The Incomparable Gena Rowlands

“I emerged from the screening changed,” wrote Hynes. “I had the sort of experience I often expected to have when encountering works of art but rarely, if ever, actually did. From that night forward, I saw the world differently.” A Woman Under the Influence (1974) “was the greatest work of art I had ever seen precisely because it cared not about being a great work of art—and yet was. It forsook conventional narrative, shot-making, and characterization—not for the self-conscious sake of unconventionality, but to express life more truly. It was, and remains for me, uncomfortably, stubbornly, exhilaratingly alive.”

As Mabel Longhetti, a housewife and mother of three teetering on the brink of a major crackup, Gena Rowlands delivers “the most fully human screen performance since the advent of sound.” For Jessica Kiang, the piece that Hynes wrote eighteen years ago is “the closest any other human has got to describing how I felt watching A Woman Under the Influence for the first time. This film—and Rowlands in it—is profoundly dangerous to your preestablished sense of what art can be.”

The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis wrote about a crucial sequence in the film on Thursday, the day after we learned that Rowlands had passed away at the age of ninety-four. Mabel and her husband, Nicky (Peter Falk)—he loves her deeply but doesn’t know how to cope with her mental and emotional instability—sit alone at their dining room table. “Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft,” writes Dargis. “‘Tell me what you want me to—how you want me to be,’ she says. ‘I can be that. I can be anything.’”

Rowlands “breaks my heart each time I watch this scene, to the point that sometimes I’ve been reluctant to revisit it,” writes Dargis. “It’s overwhelming and, even after repeat viewings, it’s still shocking, and it seems as intimate and genuine as my own agonizing fights and struggles. I feel the performance—and Mabel’s confusion and desperation—in my bones.”

Rowlands grew up in the midwest, and had she been born a generation earlier, “one suspects that she would have sewn up a career running across the grand roles, from the tough-boots molls through to stoic mothers and peppery femmes fatales,” wrote Lizzie Francke in a 1995 issue of Sight and Sound. “She has the angular hardness which typifies the best of them in that period—one can imagine her, as easily as Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, or Bacall, starkly lit, dressed in Edith Head or Adrian, shoulder pads, Grecian pleated drapes, wedge slingbacks and all. Perhaps it’s just the poised way that she lights and smokes her cigarettes, that classic clinch between the lips, but she has a profile that seems to demand a portrait by Clarence Sinclair Bull.”

Instead, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she met another student, John Cassavetes. They married in 1954, and she became, as Jordan Mintzer writes in the Hollywood Reporter, “the veritable raison d’être for many of his greatest movies, which were written and directed for her to star in, and which were often inspired by the life the two shared during their thirty-five years of marriage.”

In Faces (1968), Rowlands plays “a high-priced LA call girl unafraid to speak her mind, to show her strengths and weaknesses, her playfulness and ferocity, as she remains subjected to the whims of men who pay for her services, hoping that one of them will perhaps fall in love with her,” writes Mintzer. “Rarely in any American film, and certainly any American film before that time, was a prostitute portrayed with such character and vivacity, such disarming truthfulness.”

In Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Rowlands is a museum curator who struggles to keep herself from falling in love with an eccentric parking lot attendant (Seymour Cassel). Rowlands’s Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night (1977) is a renowned actress whose realization that she is being pushed into the “older woman” phase of her career sends her over the edge. “It’s an ingeniously conceived, astonishingly acted part that encapsulates Cassavetes’s assumptions about the function of performance and the value of theatricality in social interaction,” writes Dennis Lim.

Lim has also written for us about Love Streams (1984), in which Cassavetes directs himself as Robert and Rowlands as Sarah, a brother and sister reunited as both of their lives are falling apart. “In a body of work in which gender roles always matter,” writes Lim, “Sarah is, in more ways than one, the ultimate Cassavetes woman, and Robert the ultimate Cassavetes man. Sarah, an emotional live wire, is kin to Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence and Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night, women who struggle valiantly with their capacity and need for love, with ‘how to love’ and ‘where to put it.’ A boozy charmer in a rumpled tux, with a knack for turning all interactions into transactions, Robert is a more cultured brother to the suave strip-club owner Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), or an alternate-world variant of the suburbanites in Husbands (1970), more successful and even more hollow.”

Between Opening Night and Love Streams, there was Gloria (1980), a project Rowlands asked Cassavetes to direct because it gave her a shot at playing sexy and tough as a gangster’s ex who finds herself protecting a precocious kid from the mob. The Hollywood Reporter’s Mike Barnes notes that Cassavetes once told critic and author Ray Carney that Gloria reminded Rowlands of one of her idols, Marlene Dietrich.

Rowlands “doesn’t care if it’s cinematic,” said Cassavetes, “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.”

Rowlands’s performances in all of these films are “riveting experiences in and of themselves, because Cassavetes makes the most of her incongruity within any given setting,” writes Kent Jones. “As a presence, she is innately glamorous yet earthy (the earthiness has a lot to do with that twangy midwestern voice, always on the verge of cracking with emotion), a little broad in her gestures yet exquisitely detailed in her choices, ethereally beautiful (a high school French teacher type) yet always ready for action, and finally a little too weird for superstardom. Theirs would be one of the cinema’s greatest and most complex on-screen love affairs, if not for the simple fact that it plumbs so much deeper than mere infatuation.”

To finance these films, both Cassavetes and Rowlands would take roles in larger productions such as the 1976 all-star action thriller Two-Minute Warning, and to cut costs, they’d often shoot in their own home in LA. Their three children—Nick, Alexandra, and Zoe, all of whom would become filmmakers themselves—grew up stepping over cables and ducking under lights.

In 2001, Rowlands told Gary Oldman that she and Cassavetes strived as parents “to just be human beings and talk about daily things. We’d go to bed and, sure enough, a couple of hours and I say [whispers], ‘John, you know that scene when we were coming down the hall? Did I step decisively enough before I get to the hall to carry that scene right, before I get to the hall?’ And he’d say [whispers], ‘Yeah, you did; it took you about ten takes, but you did it.’ It was definitely an obsession.”

The first film that Rowlands worked on after Cassavetes died in 1989 was Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991). She plays a casting agent who realizes that her cab driver (Winona Ryder) just might be ideal for a role she’s looking to fill. In 1996, Jarmusch told Margy Rochlin in the New York Times that while shooting in LA, “I found myself getting these really touching phone calls from Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and Peter Falk. It was like they were her three brothers, just checking up on her, seeing how she was doing. Like, Peter Falk, who I have still never even met, would call and say: ‘Jarmusch? It’s Falk. How’s Gena? Everything good?’”

In a 2015 piece for RogerEbert.com, Sheila O’Malley offers a guide to much of Rowlands’s best work, with and without Cassavetes. Her most financially successful movie was directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes. The Notebook (2004) is an adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s 1996 tearjerker of a novel about an elderly couple who fell in love in the 1940s. James Garner’s Noah is hoping to refresh the memories of these better days in Rowlands’s Allie, who suffers from dementia. The young Noah and Allie are played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and while the movie did fine when it was released, it’s since become a cult favorite.

Two months ago, Nick Cassavetes broke the news to Entertainment Weekly’s Lauren Huff that his mother was struggling with Alzheimer’s. “She’s in full dementia,” he said. “And it's so crazy—we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”

Cassavetes recalled the time that studio execs asked for reshoots of the scene in The Notebook when Rowlands’s Allie finally recognizes Garner’s Noah. “She said, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re reshooting because of my performance?’ 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 when she saw [Garner], and she burst into tears. And I was like, okay, well, we got that.”

“You know, I guess I’m the luckiest actress who ever lived,” Rowlands told Gary Oldman. “I’ve had maybe eight or nine great parts . . . and the man who wrote them and directed them loved me.” When the Guardian’s Duncan Campbell asked Rowlands in 2001 if she ever rewatched the films she worked on with John Cassavetes, she said, “I don’t really have to—when I want to, in my mind, I can roll them from the first frame right to the very end.”