RIP: GENA ROWLANDS

Gena Rowlands, the wife and muse of John Cassavetes whose unvarnished abilities found in such films as Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night and Gloria put her in the pantheon of acting legends, died Wednesday. She was 94.

Rowlands died surrounded by family members at her home in Indian Wells, California. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2019.

Rowlands received Oscar nominations for her performances in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), where she played an isolated, emotionally vulnerable housewife who lapses into madness, and Gloria (1980), where she sparkled as a pissed-off child protector who rails against the Mob.

She lost out to Ellen Burstyn of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Sissy Spacek of Coal Miner’s Daughter in those Academy Award races. Her greatness wasn’t formally acknowledged by the Academy until she received an honorary Oscar at the 2015 Governors Awards.

“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress?” Rowlands said at the ceremony. “You don’t just live one life — yours — you live many lives.”

Cassavetes directed his wife in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria as well as in Shadows (1959), A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984). He wrote all but one of those dramas as well, and together, the couple kick-started the independent film movement in America.

Survivors include their son, writer-director Nick Cassavetes, for whom Rowlands starred as a lonely widow in Unhook the Stars (1996) and as an elderly woman with dementia in The Notebook (2004). She also appeared in her son’s She’s So Lovely (1997), based on a script from John Cassavetes.

Her daughters, Zoe Cassavetes and Xan Cassavetes, are writer/directors as well.

At her best when playing beleaguered heroines, Rowlands often downplayed her corn-fed Midwestern beauty, subverting her good looks when the part called for it — as in Opening Night, when she portrayed the aging and insecure stage actress Myrtle Gordon.

Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin but left to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in in New York. It was there that she met Cassavetes, an alum a year ahead of her who spotted Rowlands in a student production of J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner.

Four months after they met, she and Cassavetes were married in 1954 and were together until he died from cirrhosis in February 1989. He was 59.

Rowlands‘ first professional stage appearance came in a Provincetown Playhouse drama. She also did live TV and was cast by producer-director Joshua Logan in 1956 to play a young woman who falls in love with an older man (Edward G. Robinson) in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night.

After 18 months with the play, Rowlands signed with MGM and made her feature debut as Jose Ferrer’s confident wife in the drama The High Cost of Loving (1958). She went on to perform in the Dalton Trumbo Western Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas, in The Spiral Road (1962) opposite Rock Hudson and in Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra.

Rowlands also won three Emmy Awards (from eight nominations), with one for playing the first lady in 1987’s The Betty Ford Story and another for portraying a waitress in a diner who is romanced by another Cassavetes regular, Ben Gazzara, in 2002’s Hysterical Blindness.

Her more recent film appearances came in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) — the first film she made after Cassavetes‘death — Silent Cries (1993), Hope Floats (1998), The Weekend (1999), The Skeleton Key (2005) and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014). She retired from acting in 2014....

HEALTHWATCH: GENA ROWLANDS

Gena Rowlands is living with Alzheimer’s disease, her son Nick Cassavetes announced. Nick directed his mother in 2004’s “The Notebook,” said Rowlands is “in full dementia.” A four-time Emmy winner and two-time Golden Globe winner, Rowlands is a screen icon best known for her acclaimed collaborations with husband John Cassavetes, including the films “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) and “Gloria” (1980). Both performances earned her Oscar nominations for best actress. She received an honorary Academy Award in 2015.

“I got my mom to play older Allie, and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and wanting to be authentic with it, and now, for the last five years, she’s had Alzheimer’s,” Cassavetes said. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”

Rowlands played the older version of Rachel McAdams’ Allie in “The Notebook,” with James Garner and Ryan Gosling starring as the older and younger version of her love interest, Noah. The film grossed $117 million at the worldwide box office and endures as one of the most popular romance films of the 2000s.

Cassavetes’ grandmother and Rowlands’ mother, the actress Lady Rowlands, also had Alzheimer’s disease. Rowlands told O magazine in 2004 while promoting “The Notebook” that she channeled her mother while playing Allie.

“This last one — ‘The Notebook,’ based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks — was particularly hard because I play a character who has Alzheimer’s,” Rowlands told the publication at the time. “I went through that with my mother, and if Nick hadn’t directed the film, I don’t think I would have gone for it — it’s just too hard. It was a tough but wonderful movie.”

Speaking to our blog, Nick Cassavetes said that he has nothing but fond memories of working with his mother on “The Notebook” set. He remembered one moment in which studio executives forced him to reshoot the ending because they wanted Rowland’s older Allie to cry more when she realizes her history with Garner’s Noah.

“She said, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re reshooting because of my performance?,'” Cassavetes remembered. “We go to reshoots, and now it’s one of those things where mama’s pissed and I had asked her, ‘Can you do it, mom?’ She goes, ‘I can do anything,’. I promise you, on my father’s life, this is true: Teardrops came flying out of her eyes [on the first take] when she saw [Garner], and she burst into tears. And I was like, okay, well, we got that… It’s the one time I was in trouble on set.”

Rowlands’ last feature film role was the 2014 comedy “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” co-starring Cheyenne Jackson...