Gena Rowlands, veteran actress who brought her husband John Cassavetes’ films to life, dies at 94

Award-winning actress Gena Rowlands, whose performances in “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Gloria” and “The Notebook” were among her many acclaimed collaborations with her late husband John Cassavetes and son Nick, died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells after a years-long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94.

Rowland’s death was confirmed by the office of Danny Greenberg, Nick Cassavetes’ agent at WME. Further details are not available at this time.

An often unsung actress of quality and talent, Rowlands has received glowing reviews for her film and television work – which spanned six decades – particularly for the projects she worked on with her husband. She was nominated for Oscars for her leading roles in his acclaimed 1974 drama “A Woman Under the Influence” and the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria” – as well as two films directed by her son: “Unhook the Stars” and “The Notebook.”

Rowlands played tough guys, glamour girls and grandes dames, with suburban housewives in between. She moved effortlessly between John Cassavetes’ spontaneous filmmaking style and the tightly controlled world of network television.

“The great thing about being an actress is that you don’t just live one life, you live many lives,” said Rowlands when she accepted her honorary Oscar in 2015. “You’re not tied to yourself your whole life.”

Read more: Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s, son Nick Cassavetes reveals: “She is completely demented”

Towards the end of her life, Rowlands battled Alzheimer’s disease and the dementia that came with it. In June 2024, on the 20th anniversary of The Notebook, Nick Cassavetes revealed his mother’s illness.

“She has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for five years,” he said at the time, adding: “She is completely demented.”

Despite a long list of critically acclaimed performances, Rowlands never became a superstar and never appeared in a blockbuster film – and perhaps never wished to. Nevertheless, many critics and contemporaries considered her one of the best actresses of her time.

“I really think she’s the best film actress of her generation, or any generation,” director Arthur Allan Seidelman told the Times in 2014. “Every moment she shows you is absolutely truthful and comes from an insight into a character. She has the ability to really get into that character.”

Not surprisingly, her career was closely linked to the work of her husband, whom she met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1951 and married three years later. Their decades-long marriage produced ten films and three children before John Cassavetes died in 1989.

Read more: “It is incredibly beautiful” to receive an honorary Oscar, says Gena Rowlands

“When I met John, I didn’t know if he was really attracted to me or the strapless red velvet dress I was wearing,” she told The Times in 1996. “But from then on we had 31 fantastic years, three children, a wonderful working relationship. We lived the way we wanted to live.”

Rowlands and Cassavetes first worked together in 1955’s Time for Love, where she played a modest small-town girl and he played a traveling salesman who wows her. In another appearance with Cassavetes, Won’t It Ever Be Morning?, she portrayed a jazz singer who finds herself on the witness stand when her caring manager is falsely accused of murder.

A senior member of Cassavetes’ informal acting troupe, which also included Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel, Rowlands was often the face of her husband’s films at a time when many female roles were reserved for blonde bombshells.

Together they were celebrated as kings of independent cinema, working outside the controlling and predictable studio system. The couple repeatedly mortgaged their Hollywood Hills home to finance their films, she said, in an effort to remain independent of Hollywood’s tight reins.

Read more: Classic Hollywood: “Dance Lessons” helps Gena Rowlands change her dance style

After Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 59, her son asked his mother to star in one of his films. In 1996, the film “Unhook the Stars” was released, in which she played a middle-aged woman finally free from her family responsibilities.

Her late husband “wrote wonderful roles for women, and of course I got them,” she told the Times at the time. “So it’s very emotional and satisfying to have a son who puts a script in my lap and says, ‘Mother, let’s do this movie.'”

“Mama was hip,” Nick Cassavetes wrote in a 2000 article for the LA Times Magazine. “God, she was beautiful. With her skinny legs, her Ungaro outfits and the big Jackie O sunglasses. And that hair. Dad always called her ‘Golden Girl.'”

The actress was born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. She was the daughter of Edwin Rowlands, a Wisconsin state senator, and Mary Allen Neal, a homemaker. Her older brother, David Rowlands, was also an actor. Her mother later began a stage career under the name Lady Rowlands.

Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York City to study acting. She met John Cassavetes after an audition for the American Academy at Carnegie Hall.

She also worked in repertory theater and made her Broadway debut in 1956 opposite Edward G. Robinson in “Middle of the Night.” She made her film debut in Jose Ferrer’s 1958 drama “The High Cost of Loving.”

Reading was what first attracted Rowlands to acting. She was a sickly child and spent her free time reading voraciously. The lives of the characters she read about inspired in her a desire to become an actor. She found such a character in Mabel Longhetti, the increasingly unpredictable housewife in A Woman Under the Influence, who struggles to maintain her delicate emotional balance.

The drama is considered by many to be the greatest triumph of the collaboration between Cassavetes and Rowlands and earned both films Oscar nominations.

“It was quite a difficult role,” said Rowlands. “But I like difficult roles.”

Although she was forever associated with the Cassavetes projects — including “Faces” and “Love Streams” — she also worked with other directors, including Woody Allen in “Another Women” and on various television projects such as “An Early Frost” and “The Betty Ford Story,” for which she won an Emmy. She also won Emmys for “Face of a Stranger” and “Hysterical Blindness.”

She won a Daytime Emmy for her role in The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie. In 2007, she appeared in Broken English, an independent film directed by her daughter Zoe Cassavetes.

The opportunity to play controversial First Lady Betty Ford in the 1987 TV movie also offered Rowlands the kind of challenge she cherished. “I like playing people who have a very strong emotional attachment to something,” she told The Times in 1987.

Rowlands received an honorary Oscar for her lifetime achievement in 2015. The award was presented to her by her son. The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. honored her the following year with an award for her professional achievement.

Rowlands also endeared herself to a new generation of fans with her brief appearance in The Notebook, her son’s 2004 adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s sentimental love story starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.

“I didn’t think it would have such an impact,” Rowlands said of the film in a 2016 Variety interview. “I think it was such a big success because it was about the realization that love can last a lifetime. That’s not often how it’s portrayed. In most films, you don’t see a story progress from beginning to end with the possibility that love can maybe last forever.”

In addition to her son, Rowlands is survived by her second husband Robert Forrest, daughters Alexandra and Zoe, and several grandchildren. Her brother David Rowlands died in 2000.

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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.