Gena Rowlands, the unsung lady of independent cinema and wife of late director John Cassavetes, has died (2024)

Award-winning actor Gena Rowlands, whose appearances in “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Gloria” and “The Notebook” were among her many celebrated collaborations with her late husband, John Cassavetes, and their son, Nick, died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells after a years-long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94.

Rowland’s death was confirmed by the office of Danny Greenberg, Nick Cassavetes’ agent at WME. No other details are available at this time.

An often unsung actor of quality and consummate talent, Rowlands earned glowing reviews for her film and TV work — which spanned six decades — especially the projects she worked on with her husband — earning Oscar nominations for her leading roles in his acclaimed 1974 drama “A Woman Under the Influence” and the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria” — and two films directed by her son, “Unhook the Stars” and “The Notebook.”

Rowlands embodied tough cookies, glamour girls and grandes dames, with suburban housewives in between. She shifted easily between John Cassavetes’ shoot-from-the-hip style of filmmaking and the tightly controlled world of network television.

“What’s great about being an actress is you don’t just live one life, you live many lives,” Rowlands said on accepting her honorary Oscar in 2015. “You are not just stuck with yourself all of your life.”

Toward the end of her life, Rowlands battled Alzheimer’s disease and its characteristic dementia. In June 2024, while commemorating the 20th anniversary of “The Notebook,” Nick Cassavetes revealed his mother’s illness.

“For the last five years, she’s had Alzheimer’s,” he said at the time, adding, “She’s in full dementia.”

Despite a lengthy string of widely praised performances, Rowlands never became a superstar and never appeared — and, perhaps, never wished to have appeared — in a blockbuster film. Just the same, many critics and contemporaries regarded her as one of the era’s finest actors.

“I really think she’s the finest film actress of her generation or any other generation,” director Arthur Allan Seidelman told The Times in 2014. “Every moment she gives you is totally truthful and comes from insight into a character. She has the ability of really putting herself in that character.”

Not surprisingly, her career was entwined with the work of her husband, whom she met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1951 and married three years later. Their decades-long union yielded 10 films and three children before John Cassavetes’ death in 1989.

“When I met John, I didn’t know whether he was actually taken by me or the red velvet strapless dress I was wearing,” she told The Times in 1996. “But from there, we went on to have 31 fantastic years, three children, a wonderful working relationship. We lived the way we wanted to.”

Rowlands and Cassavetes teamed up for the first time in 1955’s “Time for Love,” she playing a humble small-town girl, he a traveling salesman who sweeps her off her feet. In another appearance with Cassavetes, “Won’t It Ever Be Morning?” she portrays a jazz singer who finds herself on the witness stand when her devoted manager is wrongly accused of murder.

As a ranking member of Cassavetes’ informal company of actors, which included Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel, Rowlands often was the face of her husband’s films at a time when many roles for women were reserved for blond bombshells.

Together they were hailed as independent cinema royalty, operating outside the controlling and predictable studio system. The couple mortgaged their Hollywood Hills home again and again to finance his films, she said, in an effort to remain independent from the tight reins of Hollywood.

After Cassavetes died in 1989, at age 59, her son asked his mother to star in a film he was making, 1996’s “Unhook the Stars,” in which she played a middle-aged woman finally free of her family obligations.

Her late husband “wrote wonderful parts for women, and of course, I got them,” she told The Times at the time. “So it is very emotional and satisfying to have a son who puts a script in my lap and says, ‘Mother, let’s make this movie.’”

“Mom was hip,” Nick Cassavetes wrote in a 2000 piece for the L.A. Times Magazine. “God, she was beautiful. With her skinny little legs and her Ungaro outfits and the big Jackie O sunglasses. And the hair. Dad used to call her ‘Golden Girl.’”

Born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wis., on June 19, 1930, the actor was the daughter of Edwin Rowlands, a Wisconsin state senator, and Mary Allen Neal, a homemaker. Her older brother, David Rowlands, also was an actor. Later in life, her mother launched a stage career using the name Lady Rowlands.

Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York City to study drama. She met John Cassavetes after an audition for the American Academy at Carnegie Hall.

She also worked in repertory theater and made her Broadway debut opposite Edward G. Robinson in “Middle of the Night” in 1956. She made her big-screen debut in Jose Ferrer’s 1958 drama “The High Cost of Loving.”

Reading is what initially drew Rowlands to the dramatic arts. She was a sickly child and used her idle time to read voraciously. The lives of the characters she read about made her want to act. She found such a character in Mabel Longhetti, the increasingly erratic housewife in “A Woman Under the Influence” who struggles to hang onto her delicate mental equilibrium.

The drama is considered by many to be the greatest triumph of the Cassavetes-Rowlands collaborations, and it earned Oscar nominations for both.

“It was sort of a difficult role,” Rowlands said. “But I like difficult roles.”

Though she was forever associated with the Cassavetes projects — “Faces” and “Love Streams” among them — she worked with other directors as well, including Woody Allen in “Another Woman,” and on various TV projects, such as “An Early Frost” and “The Betty Ford Story,” for which she won an Emmy.

The opportunity to play embattled First Lady Betty Ford in the 1987 TV movie also offered Rowlands the type of challenge she appreciated. “I like to play people who have a very strong emotional commitment to something,” she told The Times in 1987.

She also won Emmys for “Face of a Stranger” and “Hysterical Blindness.”

She won a Daytime Emmy for her performance in “The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie.” In 2007, she appeared in “Broken English,” an independent film directed by her daughter Zoe Cassavetes.

Rowlands won an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2015. Her son presented her with the award. The Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. honored her with a career achievement award the next year.

Rowlands also endeared herself to a new generation of fans with her brief appearance in “The Notebook,” her son’s 2004 adaptation of the weepy Nicholas Sparks love story starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.

“I didn’t think it would have that kind of impact,” Rowlands said of the film in a 2016 Variety interview. “I think it was such a big hit because it was about the realization that love can last your whole life. You don’t see it depicted that way a lot. In most films you don’t get to see a story like that go from the beginning to the end with the possibility that love can be, perhaps, eternal.”

Besides her son, Rowlands is survived by second husband Robert Forrest, daughters Alexandra and Zoe and several grandchildren. Her brother, David Rowlands, died in 2000.