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.
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....
I remember also an episode of 'Columbo', in the late 70s, where she performed the wife in a wheelchair of the villain, played by the great Austrian actor Oskar Werner (the legend says that Peter Falk flew to Vienna only to persuade Werner to play a character in 'Columbo')...
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