Farewell Gena Rowlands, the formidable actress whose characters always seemed to be tipping into madness

Gena Rowlands, who has died at the age of 94, was a highly respected actor, with a fierce, edgy, often emotionally unstable on screen presence. She often played traumatised mothers or mother figures and her characters were often tinged with a brittle abrasiveness.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1930, Rowlands began her distinguished acting career in 1956, playing opposite Edward G. Robinson in Paddy Chayefsky’s play Middle of the Night on Broadway.

After several television roles, Hollywood quickly came calling, with small roles in The High Cost of Loving (1958) and Lonely Are The Brave (1962).

From that moment on, she rarely stopped working. Along the way, she worked with some of contemporary cinema’s most esteemed figures – Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Terence Davies and Paul Schrader. But her ten collaborations with husband John Cassavetes catapulted her to fame.

Working with John

Cassavetes was the pioneering independent filmmaker who made risky, edgy films and who often accepted Hollywood studio roles to secure funding for his own projects.

He and Rowlands were married in 1954 and he first directed her in the poignant drama A Child is Waiting (1963).

From then until their final collaboration in the highly acclaimed Love Streams (1984), they forged a series of groundbreaking arthouse films that explored complex human relationships and emotionally intense characters.

The American cinema of 1970s is often characterised as pivoting between the blockbusters of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and the adrenaline-fuelled adaptations of The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973). Cassavetes and Rowlands’ work figures as the third side of that triangle.

Rowlands once remarked that, when she began her career, “almost all of the women’s parts were glamour girls”.

Thanks to Cassavetes’ scripts, she changed the way Hollywood wrote female characters and challenged traditional Hollywood conventions by prioritising artistic freedom and creative control.

Most notable among their shared work were Faces (1968), where Rowlands played a disenchanted wife; Opening Night (1977), in which she portrayed an ageing actress; and Gloria (1980), a mainstream crime comedy drama that earned her a second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Rowlands loved the larger-than-life role of Gloria, the crime boss’s moll who goes on the run. Critics noted how it tapped into the way Rowlands often thought about herself: as the sexy but tough woman who didn’t really need a man.

The ‘inside-out’ actress

Rowlands has been described as an “inside out” actress in her approach to performance.

She would start with the script, familiarise herself with the lines, absorbing and reflecting on them. Only once the lines were learned would she start with the character.

The bravado we see on screen was not improvised or spontaneous, but the result of meticulous craft and nuance.

Her counterparts – Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson and Ellen Burstyn – were never as brave. Rowlands’ performances appeal to us through their raw emotion and deep psychological insight.

This approach, coupled with Cassavetes’ love of gritty realism and no-nonsense approach to characters, created a series of unique naturalistic performances. “You can’t hide anything from film”, Rowlands once admitted.

A masterpiece of raw authenticity

Her first Academy Award nomination came for the tour de force performance in A Woman Under the Influence in 1974. Playing Mabel Longhetti, a woman struggling with mental health issues, Rowlands offers a poignant exploration of human vulnerability and resilience.

Aided by Cassavetes’ unique filmmaking style – naturalistic dialogue, improvised scenes, a wonderful ear for speech patterns – she walks a delicate line between pathos and hysteria.

Rowlands would later confess she had difficulty initially in knowing how to play Mabel, so manic and detached was the character.

But the result is breathtaking. In scene after scene, it barely looks as if she is acting. Small wonder that future generations of actors and filmmakers, from Cate Blanchett to Pedro Almodóvar, regard A Woman Under the Influence as the unforgettable expression of what complex, authentic acting should be.

A return to the spotlight

Though Cassavetes died in 1989, Rowlands continued to work regularly on network television. She won an Emmy in 1987 playing the titular character in The Betty Ford Story and a second for the life-affirming fable The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie in 2003, a performance described by one reviewer as “incandescent”.

Modern audiences remember her most fondly for her appearance in The Notebook (2004), directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, as the older version of Allie Calhoun, played by Rachel McAdams.

Towards the end of the film, Allie, now crippled with dementia, becomes confused and agitated, and starts yelling at her beloved Noah and the health-care workers. It’s a glimpse of Rowlands from three decades earlier, prowling a New York street in A Woman Under the Influence, asking startled passersby what time it is.

She received an Honorary Academy Award in 2015 and told a delightful story about working with Bette Davis, her idol. Davis, like Rowlands, was fiercely independent, and a straight talker.

Back in 1982, the great American playwright Tennessee Williams wrote

Gena possesses a titanic talent. She’s violent yet sweet; manic yet lucid; beautiful yet plain; accessible yet unknowable.

Wise words indeed.