Remembering Gena Rowlands

I was a teenager when I first watched A Woman Under the Influence (1974), perhaps director John Cassavettes’ magnum opus. The film, about an unstable housewife whose mental illness imperils her marriage. The production sounds simple on the surface but in the hands of Cassavetes and his wife, the late actress Gena Rowlands, it blooms into a startling, brutally honest, and even disturbing affair.

A Woman Under the Influence is a one-woman show, though this statement should not in any way be perceived as a slight against the late, great Peter Falk, who played Rowlands’ character’s husband. The film works precisely because of Rowlands and those who see it can’t walk away afterward without acknowledging that Rowlands dominates every frame. She received a nomination for Best Actress at the Academy Awards but lost to Ellen Burstyn—a brilliant performer in her own right—in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).

Rowlands died last week at the age of 94, surrounded by her family, in the city of Indian Wells, a California sunbeam situated between Palm Desert and La Quinta. Last month, her son, director Nick Cassavetes, revealed in an interview with The New York Times that Rowlands was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 2019. The news that one of our greatest performers, one of the finest and most expressive actresses the United States has ever had the privilege of producing, a woman whose entire career was dependent on memorization, saddened fans nationwide. It also felt rather cruel: Rowlands had once starred in and received wide praise for her performance in The Notebook (2004), a film directed by her son, in which she played a woman living with dementia.

Despite decades of work and awards recognition in films as diverse as Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) and television productions as rich as The Betty Ford Story (1987) and Hysterical Blindness (2002), two of the three roles for which she won Emmy Awards (the other being 1992’s Face of a Stranger), Rowlands is most recognized for the films she made with her husband. Together, John Cassavetes and Rowlands spearheaded what would become America’s rich independent film movement. Following an uncredited role in his Shadows (1959), she gained attention for her work in A Child is Waiting (1963), in which she appeared alongside Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. But it was Faces (1968), a movie about the core of people’s relationships, that put them on the map.

After Faces garnered three Academy Award nominations, the future was indeed very bright for the husband and wife team. And while they certainly appeared in other people’s movies—for instance, costarring in 1982’s Tempest—they did so to support their own projects.

“We wanted a certain way of life. We wanted to get up and really do what we wanted to do that day,” she once told an interviewer. “We didn’t want to go do something that everyone said we should do. Believe me, everyone was saying we were doing the wrong thing, all of the time. But it was terribly satisfying.”

Indeed it was: the romantic comedy-drama Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) featured her as an offbeat parking attendant, Opening Night (1977) as a distressed actress, and in Gloria (1980), for which she received another Academy Award nomination, as a mob moll on the run with a young boy. The last film of their creative partnership, 1984’s Love Streams, features the couple playing brother and sister. You could tell Cassavetes and Rowlands trusted each other as performers and as people as soon as you envelop yourself in the film’s passionate sensitivity.

Cassavetes, a longtime alcoholic, died of cirhossis complications in 1989. And while Rowlands would go on to marry again, much of her legacy is inextricably linked with that of her late husband’s. He was her biggest cheerleader.

“She sets the initial premise and follows the script very completely,” Cassavetes once said. “Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure.”

He added:

“She doesn’t care if it’s cinematic, doesn’t care where the camera is, doesn’t care if she looks good — doesn’t care about anything except that you believe her. She caught the rhythm of that woman living a life she’d never seen. When she’s ready to kill, I’m amazed at how coldly she does it.”

It was the height of praise from a man who, Rowlands later said, treated her no differently than he treated other longtime collaborators such as the aformentioned Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel. She recalled asking him a question while filming the first scene in A Woman Under the Influence. “I said, ‘I am sort of stuck.’ He said, ‘Gena, before you go any further, I wrote the picture with you in mind. You said you liked it.’ I said I loved it. He said, ‘You said you wanted to do it.’ I said, ‘I do.’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’ “

And she did—cinephiles are all the better for it. The loss of Rowlands is an immense one for the acting and filmmaking community. “You know what’s wonderful about being an actress? You don’t just live one life,” she said at the podium in 2015 upon accepting an honorary prize from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “You live many lives.”