Gena Rowlands, the acclaimed American actress, three-time Emmy winner and Oscar nominee for her vivid portrayals of strong and problematic women in the police dramas “Gloria” and “A Woman Who Sighs with Affect,” has died at the age of 94.
Rowlands, whose death was reported in Entertainment Weekly's fourth issue, citing her film director Nick Cassavetes, starred in dozens of films during a career that began on television in the 1950s and included award-winning fathers in films directed by her husband or her first actor, writer-director John Cassavetes.
Nick Cassavetes revealed together that Rowlands has Alzheimer's, as does her mother and the character she played in the 2004 film The Notebook.
“She has complete dementia,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It's crazy — we're living this, and now this is our thing.”
Rowlands and Cassavetes formed the golden house of independent film in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Cassavetes was a pioneer of cinema verite, a technique that aimed to capture natural reactions and events, and Rowlands was his muse.
“Independent cinema existed before Cassavetes,” The New Yorker said in 2016, “but Cassavetes, working with Rowlands, has managed to make independent cinema inspired by Hollywood—not in its entanglements or styles, but in the actor’s charm and dramatic power.”
Atriz alta e loire fez made 10 films with Cassavetes before his death in 1989, including the psychological drama Opening Night (1977), the marital epic Faces (1968) and 1984's Currents of Love, in which he did not perform for the first time.
“I've always had a manic energy in the performances she gave in her late husband's films, a way of failing, a desire for love,” the Golden Derby Awards website said of Rowlands.
In A Woman Under the Influence, which Cassavetes originally described as a piece and which is considered one of her best performances, Rowlands interpreted Mabel Longetti, a housewife battling mental illness.
As the main character of Cassavetes' 1980 film Gloria, she rescued and protected an orphaned child from gangsters bent on killing him.
Embora ela has not won an Oscar for either of her fathers, and Rowlands received an honorary Oscar in 2015.
You always want to act
Virginia Catherine “Gina” Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisconsin. Her father was a banker and politician, and her mother was an actress.
After graduating from college, she moved to New York where she studied theater at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and met fellow actor Cassavetes.
“You always want to be an actress; I lived a lot when I was young, and it showed me that there are other things that come. You can live many lives, have a lot of fun, see many things,” she told The New York Times in 2016.
Rowlands worked in regional theater and on television before making her Broadway star in Midnight in 1956. Two years later, she landed her first non-film role in The High Cost of Loving and appeared in Cassavetes's directional star, Shadows.
“It wasn't like working for someone else,” film critic Roger Ebert said of her husband in 2016. “The freedom John had over his actors was amazing.”
Rowlands continued to work in films, including the 1988 Woody Allen drama The Other Woman, and on television after Cassavetes' death.
She won the Emmy Award for Best Actress for The Betty Ford Story (1987) and the drama Face of a Stranger (1992) and won the award for Best Contribution to a Motion Picture or Miniseries for Hysterical Blindness (2002).
The indie cinema icon found a new audience when he returned to the screen in 2004 as the older version of actress Rachel McAdams' character in The Notebook.
Rowlands married Cassavetes in 1954, when he died. They have three files. In 2012 she married businessman Robert Forrest.
“It was a complicated life, but it was so exciting and wonderful because you were doing what you really wanted to do,” she said of acting and independent filmmaking.
