Honorary Oscar winner Gena Rowlands is best known for her groundbreaking on-screen collaboration with her husband, actor and director John Cassavettes, and for her role as a woman with Alzheimer’s disease who tells a story of forbidden young love in The notebookdied Wednesday at her home in California, TMZ reported. She was 94.
Rowlands’ son, Nick Cassavettes—who directed The notebook—revealed in June 2024 that Rowlands, like her character in the film, is suffering from Alzheimer’s. “She’s completely demented,” he said. Weekly Entertainment“And it’s crazy—we lived it, she acted on it, and now it’s ours.”
Rowlands “always, always wanted to be an actress,” she said in a 2015 interview for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ online series Original of the Academy“I started to realize that you don’t just have to live one life, you can be many people and do many things, and that caught my attention.”
It sounds glamorous. But the signature roles John Cassavettes created for her were realistic and emotional character studies of women on the fringes and the margins: a prostitute without the requisite Hollywood heart of gold in Facea wife and mother broken in A woman under the influence of alcohol, and a gangster’s prostitute reluctantly protects a boy from the mob. GloryThe latter two performances earned her Oscar nominations.
Rowlands is an actress who can carry a movie role. She gave an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performance in the 1987 TV movie The Betty Ford Storyand won an Emmy for playing a wife left destitute by her recently deceased husband’s gambling addiction in the 1991 TV movie Face of a stranger.
But she was always a welcome and uplifting presence in supporting roles. Cate Blanchett said as much when introducing Rowlands at the 2015 Governor’s Awards, where she received an honorary Oscar: “To me, the intense authenticity and immediacy of her performance seems the closest anyone has ever come to capturing on film the presence of a live stage performance.”
Rowlands was a unique person. Playwright Tennessee Williams compared her to “a work of art that you put yourself in front of as if they were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers slowly walking away from you.” She cited Bette Davis, with whom she co-starred in the drama, as an influence. Strangers: A Mother and Daughter Story(“The pairing is almost too good to be true, but the reality is even better,” raved critic Sheila O’Malley.) Rowlands said she responded to Davis’s independence in playing characters who didn’t fit the norm or stereotype. “For the time,” she said. Original of the Academy“Women are expected to be sweet and obedient, and that’s not something I care about. And Bette always played something that had a lot of charm.”
Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, served in the General Assembly and the State Senate before joining the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration at the Department of Agriculture. Her mother, Mary Allan Neal, who acted under the stage name Lady Rowlands, played Gena’s on-screen mother in three Cassavettes films.
Rowlands dropped out of the University of Wisconsin before graduating so she could move to New York to pursue her acting career. “I couldn’t wait to be an actress,” she said. Interview Magazine in 2016. “I wanted to be one my whole life. So I went home and told my mom and she was like, ‘Oh, that sounds cool. That’s great!’ And I told my dad and he was like, ‘I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.’ That’s how strict I was raised.”
She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met Cassavettes. Upon seeing her for the first time, he reportedly told a friend, “I’m going to marry her.”
