Gina Rowlands, the veteran actress who brought husband John Cassavetes’ films to life, has died at 94
Award-winning actress Gina Rowlands, whose “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Gloria” and “The Notebook” were among her many famous collaborations with her late husband John Cassavetes and their son Nick, Wednesday. He died on home in Indian Wells after years of battling Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94 years old.
Rowland’s death was confirmed by the office of Nick Cassavetes’ agent Danny Greenberg at WME. No other details are available at this time.
An often underrated actor of quality and consummate talent, Rowlands won rave reviews for her film and TV work – spanning six decades – particularly the projects she collaborated on with her husband. He received an Oscar nomination for his leading role in his 1974 hit drama “A.” Woman Under the Influence” and the 1980 crime thriller “Gloria” — and two films directed by her son, “In Hook the Stars” and “The Notebook.”
The Rowlands embodied tough cookies, glamor girls and grande dames, with suburban housewives in between. She moved easily between the hip shooting style of John Cassavetes’ filmmaking and the tightly controlled world of network television.
“The best thing about being an actress is that you don’t just live one life, you live many lives,” Rowlands said upon accepting her honorary Oscar in 2015.
Towards the end of his life, Rowlands battled Alzheimer’s disease and its characteristic dementia. In June 2024, marking the 20th anniversary of “The Notebook”, Nick Cassavetes revealed his mother’s illness.
“For the last five years, he’s been suffering from Alzheimer’s,” he said at the time, “he’s in full blown dementia.”
Despite a long string of widely acclaimed performances, Rowlands never became a superstar and never appeared—and, perhaps, never aspired to appear—in a blockbuster film. Likewise, many critics and contemporaries considered him one of the best actors of the era.
Director Arthur Alan Seidelman told The Times in 2014, “I really think she’s the best movie actress of her generation or any generation.” “Every moment he gives you is so true and comes from the insight of a character. Really putting yourself into that character.”
Not surprisingly, her career was intertwined 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 produced 10 films and three children before John Cassavetes’ death in 1989.
“When I met John, I didn’t know if it was really me or the red velvet dress I was wearing,” she told The Times in 1996. But from there, we had 31 wonderful years, three kids, a wonderful working relationship just the way we wanted it.”
Rowlands and Cassavetes first worked together in 1955’s “Time for Love,” playing a small-town girl, a traveling salesman who sweeps him off her feet. In another appearance with Cassavetes, “Will It Never 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 Faulk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Castle, Rowlands was often the face of her husband’s films at a time when many roles were reserved for women. were reserved for hair bombs.
Together they were hailed as independent cinema royalty, operating outside the controlling and predictable studio system. The couple repeatedly remortgaged their Hollywood Hills home to finance their films, she said, in an effort to break free from the tight reins of Hollywood.
After Cassavetes’ death in 1989, at the age of 59, his son asked his mother to star in a film he was making, 1996’s “Unhook the Stars,” in which she played her family role. Played the role of a middle-aged woman free from constraints.
Her late husband “wrote wonderful parts for women, and of course I got them,” she told The Times at the time. “So it’s very emotional and satisfying to have a son who puts the script in my lap and says, ‘Mom, let’s make this movie.’
“Mom was hip,” Nick Cassavetes wrote in a 2000 piece for the LA Times Magazine. “God, she was beautiful. With her skinny little legs and her charcoal dress and the big Jackie O sunglasses. And the hair. Dad called her the ‘Golden Girl’.”
Born Virginia Catherine Rowlands on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wis., she was the daughter of actor Wisconsin state senator Edwin Rowlands and Mary Ellen Neal, a homemaker. His older brother David Rowlands was also an actor. Later in life, her mother began a stage career under the name Lady Rowlands.
Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin before moving to New York City to study drama. She met John Cassavetes after auditioning for the American Academy at Carnegie Hall.
He also worked in repertory theater and made his Broadway debut in 1956 opposite Edward G. Robinson in “Middle of the Night.” He made his big screen debut in Jose Ferrer’s 1958 drama “The High Cost of Living”.
Reading is what initially drew Rowlands to the dramatic arts. She was a sickly child and spent her idle time in reading avidly. The lives of the characters he read about made him want to act. She found one such role in Mabel Longhetti, a grown-up erratic housewife who struggles to maintain her fragile mental balance in “Woman Under the Influence.”
The play is considered by many to be the greatest triumph of the Cassavetes-Rowlands collaboration, and earned them both Oscar nominations.
“It was a tough role,” Rowlands said. “But I like difficult characters.”
Although she was forever associated with Cassavetes projects – among them “Faces” and “Rivers of Love” – she also worked with other directors, including Woody Allen in “Other Women” and various TV projects. such as “Anne Early Frost.” and “The Betty Ford Story,” for which she won an Emmy. She also won Emmys for “Face of a Stranger” and “Hysterical Blindness.”
She won a Daytime Emmy for her role in “The Incredible Mrs. Richie.” In 2007, she appeared in “Broken English”, an independent film directed by her daughter Zoe Cassavetes.
The opportunity to play First Lady Betty Ford in the 1987 TV movie also offered Rowlands the kind of challenge she appreciated. “I like to play people who have a very strong emotional attachment to something,” she told The Times in 1987.
Rowlands won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2015. His son presented him with the award. Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. He was awarded the Career Achievement Award the following 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 was involved.
“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.
For More
Justin Baldoni Reportedly Hires PR Veteran Amid ‘It Ends With Us’ Crisis
Hoda Kotb “blacks out” as she poses with Tom Cruise at the Paris Olympics
Rambling Trump, Musk interview marred by technical issues
Rachel Liss, the voice of popular ‘Pokemon’ characters, has died at the age of 55
2 thoughts on “Gina Rowlands, the veteran actress who brought husband John Cassavetes’ films to life, has died at 94”