Remembering Gena Rowlands

Putting it simply, Gena Rowlands, who has died at the age of 94, was one of the most important performers in American screen history. Cinema Paradiso explains why.

'You know what's wonderful about being an actress?' Gena Rowlands told the audience while collecting her Honorary Academy Award in November 2015. 'You don't just live one life - yours - you live many lives.' For 35 years, the alternative lives she led were intrinsically bound up in her own life, as her creative partner during this period, John Cassavetes, was her husband, as well as the writer and director of the pioneering independent films for which she will be best remembered.

But Rowlands had a parallel career in the mainstream and she kept creating memorable roles after she was widowed in 1989. Few could match her intensity and integrity, with many tributes after her passing comparing her with such Hollywood greats as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lauren Bacall. She certainly stood out from peers like Angie Dickinson, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, and Ellen Burstyn. Director Sidney Lumet summed up her unique place in American cinema when he said: 'The highest compliment I can pay to her - to anyone - is that the talent frightens me, making me aware of the lack of it in so many and the power that accrues to those who have it and use it well. And the talent educates and illuminates. She is admirable, which can be said of only a few of us.'

Here, There, Everywhere

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born in the Cambria neighbourhood of Madison, Wisconsin on 19 June 1930. However, as father Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands kept having to move around for work, she and older brother David lived in several places during their childhoods. Mother Mary Ellen Neal had turned down the chance to be a Ziegfeld girl in order to marry and one wonders whether she ever watched Robert Z. Leonard's The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Girl (1941) and thought, 'What if?'

Rowlands shared little about her background, although she was apparently a sickly girl. When she was nine, the family relocated to Washington, DC after her father - a banker who had served in the state Assembly and Senate - was appointed to the Department of Agriculture during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Three years later, they returned to Wisconsin, when Edwin was appointed manager of the Milwaukee branch of the Office of Price Administration.

Another posting took the Rowlands clan to Minneapolis, Minnesota. But they settled in Arlington, Virginia long enough for Gena to graduate from Washington-Lee High School in 1947. Among the other notables to have attended the school are siblings Shirley MacLaine and Warren Beatty, as well as Forrest Tucker, Pat Priest, Sandra Bullock, and special effects maestro, Stan Winston. Type their names into the Cinema Paradiso searchline and get ordering!

Although she enrolled to study English at the University of Wisconsin, Rowlands had set her heart on becoming an actress. When she told her parents that she planned to drop out, her father said, 'I don't care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.' She got a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which was then located in New York's famous Carnegie Hall, which has featured in films as different as The World of Henry Orient (1964), Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Man on the Moon, Buena Vista Social Club (both 1999), and Green Book (2018).

Golden Girl

In order to fund her studies, Rowlands worked as an usherette in a New York cinema. She saw Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) dozens of times and, according to writer Ray Carney, became so 'fascinated with Dietrich's blend of feminine sexual allure and almost masculine toughness and swagger' that she adopted some of her mannerisms and gestures. Perhaps they were what caught the eye of AADA graduate John Cassavetes, when he spotted Rowlands at her audition in 1953.

By all accounts, Cassavetes turned to his companion and said, 'I'm going to marry her.' Rowlands wasn't seeking a boyfriend, however, and refused his request for a date. 'Once in a while,' she remembered, 'we would meet and get coffee, and he'd ask if I'd like to go out, and I said, "No, I'm not interested in going out with anyone. I'm going to be an actress."' As Cassevetes recalled, 'It was a hard struggle to convince Gena. We agree in taste on absolutely nothing.'

He jokingly paraphrased his frustrations, 'She thinks so totally opposite to anything I could conceive!' Biographer Carney also noted the chasm between Rowlands and 'the fast-talking, street-smart city boy'. He continued: 'Rowlands was socially smooth and refined; Cassavetes rough-hewn, impulsive, passionate and driven. She cared what people thought; he didn't. She was cool, poised, charming; he was half-crazy, hot-blooded and Mediterranean. Sparks flew.' Yet, despite the disparities, Cassavetes's persistence paid off and, in 1954, he and Rowlands got married. He dubbed her, 'Golden Girl', and they would stay together for the next 35 years.

Rowlands, meanwhile, had taken her first steps towards becoming an actress. Following a production of J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner, she went to Cape Cod to join the Provincetown Playhouse, where she doubled as a wardrobe mistress. This exposure led to her being cast as the Mistress of Ceremonies in All About Love at the Versailles nightclub in New York in 1951. During periods of enforced leisure, she wrote storylines for Crime Does Not Pay comic-books and later joked, 'I could tell you what any three-time loser got for assault and battery in any prison in the country.'

Eventually, however, Rowlands got her big Broadway break when she understudied for the female lead in The Seven Year Itch and took over the role that Marilyn Monroe would play in Billy Wilder's 1955 film when the comedy went on tour. On her return to the Big Apple, Rowlands landed her first TV gig, when she joined star Paul Stewart in a 1954 episode of the espionage series, Top Secret. She was also cast as Myrtle Wilson in the Robert Montgomery Presents adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1955). Karen Black and Isla Fisher played the part in the big-screen versions directed by Jack Clayton (1974) and Baz Luhrmann (2013) .

Seven further one-off live teleplays kept Rowlands busy for the rest of the year. But her star rose after she replaced Eva Marie Saint ( whose 100th birthday was recently celebrated by Cinema Paradiso ) in the role of divorced receptionist Betty Preisser in Joshua Logan's Broadway production of Paddy Chayefsky's Middle of the Night (1956). Edward G. Robinson took the role of Jerry Kingsley, which would pass to Fredric March alongside Kim Novak in Delbert Mann's 1959 film version. However, Rowlands remained with the play for 18 months and her reward was a contract with MGM to make two pictures a year for five years. She made her feature bow as Jenny Fry alongside the self-directing José Ferrer in The High Cost of Loving (1958). But the saga of a couple hoping for a baby failed to find an audience. As Rowlands shrugged, 'I think maybe 50 people saw it,' and her movie career stalled.

Fortunately, television was booming and roles followed in Laramie, Markham, Riverboat, Adventures in Paradise, The Island, Target: The Corruptors!, 77 Sunset Strip, Breaking Point, and Dr Kildare. She also guested on showcases hosted by Tab Hunter, Dick Powell, Lloyd Bridges, and Bob Hope, while also joining Cassavetes in his hit crime show, Johnny Staccato. Cinema Paradiso users can find Rowlands in the 'She Walks in Beauty' and 'No Tears For Savannah' episodes of Bonanza (1959-73) and The Virginian (1962-71) respectively. More memorably, she appeared as Lucille Jones in 'The Doubtful Doctor' instalment of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62) and as Helen Martin in 'Ride the Nightmare' and Louise Henderson in 'The Lonely Hours', which were both transmitted during Season One of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).

Although TV paid the bills - hence the recurring role of Teddy Carella, a deaf and non-verbal cop's wife in 87th Precinct (1961-62) - Rowlands wanted to develop as a stage actress. As she told one interviewer, 'I wasn't planning to go into pictures at all.' But she couldn't resist the chance to play Jerry Bondi, the ex-lover of Kirk Douglas's character in David Miller's Lonely Are the Brave, and Els, doctor Rock Hudson's highly religious fiancée in Robert Mulligan's The Spiral Road (both 1962). The latter experience was recalled in Mark Rappaport's 1992 documentary, Rock Hudson's Home Movies.

Further small-screen assignments came via two episodes of Burke's Law (1963-66) and guest spots in Run For Your Wife, The Long, Hot Summer, The Road West, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., and Garrison's Gorillas. However, Rowlands attracted a cult following as gold-digging socialite Adrienne Van Leyden in the pioneering soap opera, Peyton Place (1964-69). She deemed her two-year sojourn to have been 'really fun' as Adrienne was 'a real Joan Crawford bad lady'. As she enthused on looking back, 'I came in and married old Mr Peyton and took all the money. I loved it and did it until my unfortunate demise of falling down the grand staircase.'

'You have to hand it to television,' she once noted. 'Strangely enough it takes on much more dangerous subjects than movies.' But, having essayed Rita Kosterman, the concerned stepmother who hires Frank Sinatra's private eye in Gordon Douglas's 20th Century-Fox thriller, Tony Rome (1967), Rowlands got to discover just how courageous cinema could be outside the studio system.

A One-Man Rebellion

Although born in New York in 1929, John Cassavetes spent his first seven years in Greece and spoke no English on his return to America. He applied for AADA because he'd been told it was 'packed with girls, but he had graduated before he met Rowlands. While working in television, he ran acting classes that offered an alternative to Lee Strasberg's theories on the Method.

Having made an impression playing outsiders with attitude in Andrew L. Stone's The Night Holds Terror (1955), Don Siegel's Crime in the Streets (1956), and Martin Ritt's Edge of the City (1957), Cassavetes followed his wife's example by trying his hand at live television. Sadly, Johnny Staccato isn't on disc, but Cinema Paradiso members can catch Cassavetes in Rawhide (1959-66), The Virginian, and Burke's Law, as well as the 'You Got to Have Luck' entry in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour outings, 'Murder Case' and 'Water's Edge'.

Much to Rowlands's surprise, while she was on the road with Edward G. Robinson, her husband started working with some friends on a low-budget drama about ordinary working people. She had a blink and miss her walk-on in Shadows, as a woman in a nightclub, with the focus falling on African American siblings played by Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd. Despite being rooted in the improvisational tradition, the action was thoroughly rehearsed. However, when it failed to find a distributor, Cassavetes reworked the material and this scripted version won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1960.

Undaunted by this first bid to bring edgy European realism to American cinema, Cassavetes continued to watch works by Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini, as well as the latest releases from the nouvelle vague, as he tried to experiment from within the studio system. He hoped to pair Rowlands and Montgomery Clift in the jazz drama, Too Late Blues (1961), but the studio insisted on casting Bobby Darin and Stella Stevens. Rowlands did get to co-star in A Child Is Waiting (1963), as Sophie Widdicombe, whose 12 year-old son sets Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster against each other at the Crawthorne State Mental Hospital.

Cassavetes argued with producer Stanley Kramer when his picture was altered during editing and he concentrated on acting to raise the funds to take another tilt at an independent production. On television, he cropped up in an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68). But, like Orson Welles before him, he was happy to take well-remunerated roles in commercial ventures like Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967), for which he received a Best Supporting Oscar nomination, Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), and Mel Stuart's If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969). He even went to Italy to work on Alberto De Martino's Rome Like Chicago (1968) and Giuliano Montaldo's Machine Gun McCain (1969), which also featured Britt Ekland, Gabriele Ferzetti, and Florinda Bolkan, as well as two members of what would become the Cassavetes stock company, Rowlands and Peter Falk.

Casa Cassavetes

The film that marked a shift in Cassavetes's approach to directing was Faces (1968). He cast Robert Altman's former secretary, Lynn Carlin, as Maria Forst, the middle-aged woman who goes for a night out with her friends after her husband of 15 years, Richard (John Marley), announces that he wants a divorce and leaves for a rendezvous with prostitute Jeannie Rapp (Rowlands). Shot over eight months in 1965 on monochrome 16mm, the drama included scenes set in the family home in the Hollywood Hills, which would become such a regular location that Rowlands would joke that children Nick, Alexandra, and Zoe got used to tripping over the electric cables trailing between rooms.

Marley would win the Volpi Cup for Best Actor at Venice, while Carlin and Seymour Cassell (who plays the man Maria meets at a disco) landed Best Supporting Oscar nominations. Cassavetes's screenplay was also recognised, but Rowlands left her own impression as a misused woman who has manufactured a vivacious personality to help her cope with the demands of her often demeaning work. This wasn't her only role, however, as Rowlands also cooked twice a day for the 25-strong crew, which included a young Steven Spielberg as a runner. No one was paid, as they agreed to take a deferred share of the profits. But the money was slow in coming, as it took Cassavetes three years to edit the handheld vérité footage after the first cut came in at seven hours. He whittled it down to three for its original release in 1968, although the version available from Cinema Paradiso runs for 124 minutes.

Although very much an ensemble effort, this was a particularly risky venture for Cassavetes and Rowlands, who invested their own money in the project and also did much of the publicity themselves. The critics were somewhat divided, although those who commended the picture for breaking the Hollywood mould ensured it found a small, but appreciative audience. The same was true of Husbands (1970), in which Cassavetes was joined by Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk to play New Yorkers who go on a bender following the sudden death of one of their friends.

Rowlands didn't appear in this unflinching treatise on flawed masculinity, although she later insisted that around 10 minutes of material was removed, as she considered it to be in poor taste. She would also be absent from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Cassavetes's final feature, Big Trouble (1986). But she never felt entitled to be in her husband's pictures, even though their working relationship has often been compared to that of such other stellar cine-couples as Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, and Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Cassavetes was so aware of Rowlands's strengths that he often incorporated her character traits and mannerisms into her roles, as in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), which noted her penchant for wearing sunglasses at night. Minnie Moore (Rowlands) is an unhappily married museum curator who finds herself drifting into a relationship after costing parking lot attendant Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassell) his job. Despite appearing to be entirely wrong for each other, fate keeps pulling the pair together.

Despite being backed to the tune of $1 million by Universal, this was very much a family affair, as not only did Cassavetes take an uncredited cameo as Minnie's husband, but daughters Alexandra and Zoe also appeared as a girl in a tutu and a baby. Moreover, Lady Rowlands (as Mary had been dubbed by her grandchildren) and Katherine Cassavetes stole the show as the mismatched couple's mothers, Georgia and Sheba, in a hilarious scene that must have been tricky to shoot, as Cassavetes forbade cast members from discussing their characters with each other off camera to ensure their interactions remained authentic.

The most underrated of Rowlands's performances for Cassavetes was followed by unquestionably her finest. He originally wrote A Woman Under the Influence (1974) as a stage play. However, the story of a housewife suffering a mental breakdown made so many emotional demands that Rowlands informed him, 'John, I would be dead in two weeks if I played this on stage every night.'

Mother of three Mabel Longhetti (Rowlands) starts to unravel after Nick (Peter Falk), her building foreman husband, cancels date night and she spends the time with a stranger she meets in a bar. With in-laws expressing their opinion of her mental health, Mabel becomes increasingly unpredictable. But, as family members gather to welcome her home from an institution, it's far from clear that she has been cured.

In addition to winning a Golden Globe, Rowlands also earned her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress. She lost out to Ellen Burstyn for Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, but her display of terrifying intensity and raw vulnerability has better stood the test of time. 'It was sort of a difficult role,' she said modestly. 'But I like difficult roles.'

Being married to the director didn't always make life easier, however. She joked in one profile, 'He's the most terrifying perfectionist about what he wants. As an artist, I love him. As a husband, I hate him.' Looking back on what was sometimes a fractious shoot, Rowlands recalled: 'During A Woman Under the Influence, I wasn't quite sure what he wanted in that scene where I really lose it. And I said, "John, I don't want to disappoint you but I'm not quite sure how to do this. How? How would you want me to do this? How deeply do we go into this?" He said, "Gena, you read the script. You liked it. You liked your part. You wanted to do it. Do it."

Cassavetes recognised the courage and power of her work, however. 'She sets the initial premise,' he mused, 'and follows the script very completely. Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure.' He continued: 'She doesn't care if it's cinematic, doesn't care where the camera is, doesn't care if she looks good - doesn't care about anything except that you believe her.'

In an appraisal following her death, The Hollywood Reporter wrote of her work: 'Rowlands' performance in Influence is arguably the greatest achievement by an actress in an American movie since the 1950s, and it has yet to be equaled...Rowlands' turn is on par with the searing, soul-searching work of Marlon Brando and James Dean at their best.'

Falk also excels as the blue-collar stiff who becomes abusively perplexed by his wife's condition. However, he was in a guise more familiar to TV viewers of the time when he reunited with Rowlands for 'Playback', a 1975 episode of the cult crime series, Columbo (1968-78). They would also team in William Friedkin's The Brink's Job (1978), in which Rowlands plays Mary, the wife of Tony Pino (Falk), the small-time Boston crook who devises a way to break into a seemingly impregnably secure vault.

This was typical of the kind of jobbing assignments that Cassavetes and Rowlands took to fund their own projects. Indeed, they even co-starred in Larry Peerce's Two-Minute Warning (1976), although they didn't share any scenes, as SWAT sergeant, Chris Button (Cassavetes), strives with Captain Peter Holly (Charlton Heston) to prevent a sniper from opening fire on fans like bickering marrieds Steve (David Janssen) and Janet (Rowlands) at an American Football game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

Rowlands also guested on TV shows like Medical Center, Circle of Fear, and Marcus Welby, M.D., as she was always keen to work. Appropriately, Cassavetes next cast her as an actress in Opening Night (1977), a Bergmanesque melodrama in which the struggles Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands) has in connecting with a character in a new play are compounded by what she takes to be visitations by the spirit of an obsessive fan. With Ben Gazzara as her director and Joan Blondell as the playwright resenting Myrtle's disregard for her text, this is by far the most outré of Cassavetes's collaborations with Rowlands. But it's compelling throughout and provides fascinating insights into the creative process.

Rowlands won the Best Actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival. But, in spite of the brilliance of herself and Joan Blondell (a veteran of several 1930s Warner classics, including The Public Enemy, 1931 and Gold Diggers of 1933, 1933), the film flopped in the United States. Looking back, Rowlands was able to take the rough with the smooth. 'We wanted a certain way of life,' she confided in an interview. 'We wanted to get up and really do what we wanted to do that day. We didn't want to go do something that everyone said we should do. Believe me, everyone was saying we were doing the wrong thing, all of the time. But it was terribly satisfying.'

Such was this unique way of working that, when Rowlands felt like playing something close to her image of herself ('a sexy but tough woman who doesn't really need a man'), Cassavetes came up with Gloria (1980). In fact, he had written the story for Barbra Streisand, but she had turned it down because it was 'too maternal' and 'not glamorous enough'. But Rowlands would earn another Oscar nomination for her performance as onetime showgirl Gloria Swenson, the South Bronx neighbour of an FBI informer who entrusts her with an incriminating ledger and the care of his young son, Phil Dawn (John Adames). Despite disliking kids, Gloria agrees to help, as she is familiar with underworld methods, as an old boyfriend was a gangster. However, her plight is exacerbated when the press start reporting that she has abducted the boy.

Rowlands had nothing but fond memories of the shoot. 'I talked John into directing,' she said, 'and I had a great time shooting people and dodging people and running after taxis.' She also explained, 'With John's scripts, it's like being an astronaut on the moon for the first time. The air is very light, you have to wear heavy boots, you have to push yourself out into areas that are very frightening.' Usually, Rowlands got to know her character's inner life before she started to work out how she walked and talked. 'I think it must be like writing,' she explained, 'you draw on things that you have wondered about, people in restaurants, things that you have seen, quarrelling at the table, something here, something there, they all come together in one piece.' For Gloria, though, she started with the physical rather than the psychological. 'I wanted to develop a walk that said everything about the character right away,' she elucidated, 'because she was alone, a tough woman in New York and body language means a lot in that big city.'

The film shared the Golden Lion at Venice with Louis Malle's Atlantic City. On Oscar night, however, Sissy Spacek won Best Actress for her performance as Loretta Lynn in Michael Apted's Coal Miner's Daughter (both 1980). Nevertheless, Rowlands remains the only woman to have been directed twice to a Best Actress nomination by her husband. The other five one-timers are Elisabeth Bergner for Paul Czinner's Escape Me Never (1935), Joanne Woodward for Paul Newman's Rachel, Rachel (1968), Jean Simmons for Richard Brooks's The Happy Ending (1969), Julie Andrews for Blake Edwards's Victor/Victoria (1982), and Frances McDormand for Joel Coen's Fargo (1996). The latter is the only woman to have won and before anyone brings up Melina Mercouri being directed to a nomination by Jules Dassin in Never on Sunday (1960), they didn't get married until 1966.

Although they frequently acted in the same films, Cassavetes and Rowlands didn't always share scenes. They got to do so, as Philip and Antonia Dimitrius, in Paul Mazursky's Shakespearean update, Tempest (1982), and clearly enjoyed the experience so much that, when Jon Voight withdrew at the last moment, they played siblings Robert Harmon and Sarah Lawson in Love Streams (1984). She is battling depression after her divorce from Jack (Seymour Cassell). But she realises that her brother - an alcoholic writer who has just been humiliated while caring for his young son with estranged partner, Susan (Diahnne Abbott) - is in a bad way and needs her time and support. So, she buys him some farm animals in the hope of giving his life a new focus.

Once again, filmed in the family home (although in a more stylistically conventional manner than the earlier pictures), this reworking of a Ted Allan play was produced (somewhat incongruously) by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for Cannon Films, as Mark Hartley recalls in Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014). It won the Golden Bear at Berlin, but has not been consecrated by critics to the same degree as the other Cassavetes-Rowlands teamings. They would work together again, in a rare return to the stage, when Rowlands and Carol Kane co-starred in Cassavetes's play, A Woman of Mystery (1987). But he died two years later, at the age of 59, of cirrhosis of the liver. In their review of the play, the critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote of Rowlands, 'the feeling is that of a valiant woman who will keep going until she comes to a better place'. She might well have taken those words to heart, as she stepped out alone for the first time since she was 24.

Refinding Her Feet

Although she had continued to take leading roles in her husband's films, Rowlands decided to limit her extra-curricular activity to television. In addition to the occasional guest slot, she also graced a number of teleplays, as they offered her more substantial roles than the kind of theatrical feature being made in New Hollywood in the 1970s. As she later explained, 'A lot of women, when they can't keep doing young romantic roles, don't want to consider character parts and quit sooner. But I just looked at the scripts and kept seeing what I'd like to do, and never worried about it.'

In Jerry Thorpe's A Question of Love (1978), Rowlands and Jane Alexander played a lesbian couple battling the former's ex-husband in a child custody battle that was based on actual events. The following year, Rowlands fulfilled the ambition of a lifetime when she got to appear alongside her favourite film star. Bette Davis won an Emmy for her work in Milton Katselas's Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979), which sees embittered widow, Lucy Mason (Davis), reach out when her daughter, Abigail (Rowlands), is diagnosed with cancer.

Both films should really be on disc for the quality of the acting alone. But teleplays tend to slip through the cracks, as was the case with David Lowell Rich's Thursday's Child (1983), in which Rowlands and Don Murray play Victoria and Parker Alden, who discover that their 17 year-old son, Sam (Rob Lowe), needs a heart transplant. Such dramas are often dismissed as 'disease of the week' movies, but there is no excuse for the unavailability of John Erman's An Early Frost (1985), as this Emmy winner was the first mainstream film to tackle AIDS. Rowlands teamed with Ben Gazzara as Katherine and Nick Pierson, whose son, Michael (Aidan Quinn), discovers he's HIV+.

Cinema Paradiso can bring you Rowlands's turn as a witch in 'Rapunzel' in an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-87), but her Emmy-winning display as the First Lady battling her demons in David Greene's The Betty Ford Story (1987) has not been released. Also missing are the string of teleplays that Rowlands made as she sought to keep busy after being widowed: William Graham's Montana (1990); Linda Yellen's Parallel Lives (1994); Arthur Allan Seidelman's Grace and Glorie; and Michael Switzer's Best Friends For Life (both 1998). To be frank, snobbery is the main reason these well-acted dramas are not on DVD or Blu-ray, as TV-movies are often regarded as inferior to cinema releases. Such ignorance deprives audiences of the chance to see great artists at work, with Rowlands being on Emmy-winning form as a widow who discovers her husband has gambled away their savings and opens her apartment to the homeless Tyne Daly in Claudia Weill's Face of a Stranger (1991).

Paul Schrader cast Rowlands in Light of Day (1987), as Jeanette Rasnick, the mother who disapproves of daughter Patti (Joan Jett) neglecting her young son to play with brother Joe (Michael J. Fox) in the Cleveland rock band, The Barbusters. But she was markedly more sympathetic in Woody Allen's Another Woman (1988), as Marion Post, a middle-aged academic who comes to reassess her relationships with her husband (Ian Holm), brother (Harris Yulin), and best friend (Sandy Dennis) after overhearing a stranger (Mia Farrow) discussing her life during her therapy sessions in an adjoining office.

A key member of the indie cabal that had followed in Cassavetes's footsteps, Jim Jarmusch persuaded Rowlands to return to films after his death in Night on Earth (1991). In the first of the five vignettes centring on encounters between taxi drivers and their passengers, Hollywood executive Victoria Snelling becomes convinced that Corky (Winona Ryder) would be perfect for the film she is casting. As Jarmusch later revealed, '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?"'

Swedish director Lasse Hallström next cast Rowlands in his English-language debut, Once Around (1991). This isn't currently available, even through Rowlands is on fine form as Marilyn Bellas, the Boston wife of an Italian American construction boss (Danny Aiello), who makes her opposition clear when her oldest daughter, Renata (Holly Hunter), decides to marry Sam Sharpe (Richard Dreyfus), a Lithuanian American salesman who is old enough to be her father.

Having played Kim Adams's mother in Bud Cort's little-seen, but star-studded Venice Beach comedy, Ted & Venus (1991), Rowlands was nominated for a Golden Globe for Martha Coolidge's teleplay, Crazy in Love (1992). The following year, she made a rare excursion into the past to join Annabeth Gish, Phyllis Logan, Judy Parfitt, Cherie Lunghi, and Chloe Webb in an internment camp following the Japanese occupation of Singapore in Anthony Page's Silent Cries (1993). While we can't bring you this fact-based drama, Cinema Paradiso can recommend four titles on the same theme: Jack Lee's A Town Like Alice (1956); the award-winning BBC series, Tenko (1981-84); Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun (1987); and Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road (1997).

Keeping It In the Family

In 1995, Rowlands reunited with Lasse Hallström on Something to Talk About, a Callie Khouri-scripted drama, in which Georgia (Rowlands) and Wyly King (Robert Duvall) are forced to face their own infidelity issues after daughter Grace (Julia Roberts) leaves her cheating husband, Eddie (Dennis Quaid), and is surprised by the reaction when she returns to the family farm with her young daughter. Solid though Rowlands is in this well-made drama, she absolutely excels as Mae Morgan, the livewire cabaret singer who lights up the life of her small-town nephew (Jacob Tierney) in The Neon Bible (both 1995), Terence Davies's splendid adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's novel set in 1940s Georgia.

It's such a shame that this is currently out of reach and the same goes for Unhook the Stars (1996), which saw Rowlands being directed for the first time by her son, Nick Cassavetes. He co-scripted the story that charts the friendship between empty-nester, Mildred Hawks (Rowlands), and her Salt Lake City neighbour, Monica (Marisa Tomei), and her young son, J.J. (Jake Lloyd). With Gérard Depardieu co-starring as a trucker who asks Millie on a date, this is well worth a release. But mother and son also worked together on She's So Lovely (1997). Rowlands is limited to a cameo as Miss Jane Green, however, as the focus falls on the triangle between Robin Wright and new partner, John Travolta, and ex-hubby Sean Penn, who has spent a decade in a secure hospital after attacking James Gandolfini, the neighbour who had assaulted Wright when she was pregnant. There are echoes of past Cassavetes themes, but critics and audiences were largely underwhelmed.

They were marginally more enthusiastic about John Roberts's Paulie, in which a parrot (voiced by Jay Mohr) relates his adventures to a Russian immigrant janitor (Tony Shalhoub), which include a road trip with a widowed artist named Ivy (Rowlands) in a bid to find the bird's first and favourite owner, a young girl with a stutter. This was the first of four films in the busiest year of Rowlands's career and she moved on to play Sandra Bullock's mother, Ramona Calvert, in Forest Whitaker's Hope Floats. She welcomes her daughter home to Smithville, Texas after she's humiliated on a reality talk show by her two-timing husband. Fortunately, healing help is at hand in the form of old flame, Harry Connick, Jr.

Rowlands was also on grandma duty in Peter Chelsom's The Mighty (1998), which was headlined by Sharon Stone, who was preparing to reprise the title role in Sidney Lumet's 1999 remake of Gloria. Adapted from a novel by Rodman Philbrick, the action centres on Max Kane (Elden Henson), a 14 year-old with learning difficulties, who lives with grandparents, Susan (Rowlands) and Elton Pinneman (Harry Dean Stanton), whom he calls 'Gram' and 'Grim'. He's tormented by a gang of bullies known as 'the Doghouse Boys', but he finds an unlikely ally in fellow outsider, Kevin Dillon (Kieran Culkin), who is doted on by his mother, Gwen (Stone), because he has Morquio syndrome.

An inspired decision paired Rowlands with Sean Connery in one of the many interweaving Los Angeles storylines in Willard Carroll's Playing By Heart (1998). In their segment, TV cook Hannah prepares to renew her wedding vows after 40 years of marriage to Paul. However, she is more interested in helping him face up to the fact that he has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. Critic Kent Jones once opined that Rowlands was 'a little too weird for superstardom'. But she more than holds her own against a cinematic icon whose career had run parallel to her own.

Fresh from having been dubbed 'A Woman For All Seasons' by the prestigious French journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, Rowlands found herself in the august company of Bette Davis and Romy Schneider in the dedication to Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (1999). She kept working, though, and joined another impressive ensemble for Brian Skeet's The Weekend (1999), an adaptation of a Peter Cameron novel that sees the much-widowed Laura Ponti (Rowlands) and resentful daughter, Nina (Brooke Shields), attend a upstate New York dinner party thrown by Marian (Deborah Kara Unger) and John Kerr (Jared Harris) to mark the first anniversary of her brother's AIDS-related death.

Despite the director being British, this isn't available to rent. Regrettably, the same is true of Sheldon Larry's The Color of Love: Jacey's Story (2000), a teleplay in which Georgia Porter and Lou Hastings (Louis Gossett, Jr.) fight for custody of their bi-racial granddaughter. This brought Rowlands an Emmy nomination, as did Wild Iris (2001), which sees Minnie Brinn (Rowlands) battle to keep depressed daughter Iris (Laura Linney) off the bottle following her husband's suicide. Linney won the Emmy for Best Actress in what turned out to be the final film for a director who had given Cassavetes an early TV credit in 'The Expendable House', a 1955 production for Goodyear Television Playhouse (1951-57).

Cinema Paradiso can, however, offer Mira Nair's Hysterical Blindness (2002), which was adapted for television by Laura Cahill from her own stage play. Reynolds, Ben Gazzara, and Uma Thurman all won Emmys for their work in a drama set in Bayonne, New Jersey in 1987, where Virginia (Rowlands) and Debbie Miller (Thurman) seek a little joy in their often tough lives. Debbie has been diagnosed with the eponymous eye condition, while Virginia has found late-life love with Nick (Gazzara). But things don't work out as either mother or daughter would have hoped.

Staying on the small screen, Rowlands was cast as Charlie Kate Birch, one of three women in a North Carolina town (the other two being Mimi Rogers and Susan May Pratt) who refuse to be defined by convention in Joan Micklin Silver's Charms For the Easy Life (2002). She then won a Daytime Emmy for her performance in Paul Johansson's My New Best Friend (aka The Incredible Mrs Ritchie, 2003), a drama produced by her son in which Evelyn accepts the suggestion of Principal Dewitt (James Caan) that Charlie Proud (Kevin Zegers) can work in her garden to atone for the theft of her handbag in a bid to keep him out of the clutches of a street gang.

The following year, Rowlands returned to cinema in D.J. Caruso's Taking Lives (2004) to play Rebecca Asher, the Montreal mother of a suspected serial killer who is questioned by FBI profiler Illeana Scott (Angelina Jolie) about the son who proved a handful after feeling neglected in favour of his twin. However, the 2004 film for which Rowlands will forever be remembered is The Notebook, an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel that was directed by Nick Cassavetes. Much of the action takes place on Seabrook Island in South Carolina in the 1940s, as millworker Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) falls for heiress Allison Hamilton (Rachel McAdams). But it's the bookending sequences involving Rowlands and James Garner that we can absolutely guarantee will get the tears flowing.

She won a Golden Satellite Award for her work, which took on added poignancy in June 2024, when her son made the following announcement: 'I got my mom to play older Allie, and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer's and wanting to be authentic with it, and now, for the last five years, she's had Alzheimer's. She's in full dementia. And it's so crazy - we lived it, she acted it, and now it's on us.'

Rowlands certainly made the most of the two decades left to her, however. In 2005, she played Violet Devereaux, the occupant of a plantation in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, who welcomes hospice nurse, Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), to help her care for her non-speaking husband, Benjamin (John Hurt), who appears to be the victim of a stroke in Iain Softley's Gothic chiller, The Skeleton Key (2005). The following year, she returned to television as Mrs Hellman in 'Provenance', a Season Three episode of Numb3rs (2005-10), in which FBI agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) tries to help a widow recover a stolen painting that had once been confiscated by the Nazis.

At the age of 76, Rowlands ventured into new territory when she scripted the 'Quartier Latin' segment of Paris, je t'aime. Directed by Gérard Depardieu and Frédéric Auburtin, the vignette centred on a couple played by Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, who meet to reminisce over a drink before signing their divorce papers. For anyone missing the City of Light after its starring role in the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, this splendidly varied portmanteau might help ease the cravings.

Having drawn another Emmy nomination for playing the dying Melissa Eisenbloom being nursed by the grieving Jamie Spagnoletti (Lacey Chabert) in Stephen Tolkin's teleplay, What If God Were the Sun?, Rowlands returned to the clan to be directed by daughter Zoe in Broken English (both 2007). Once again in a maternal role, she played Vivien Wilder-Mann, who keeps trying to find a man for her careerist daughter, Nora (Parker Posey), who works at a boutique hotel in Manhattan. Completing a full year, Rowlands also took over from Danielle Darrieux as the grandmother in the English-language dub of Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Oscar-nominated animation, Persepolis, alongside Catherine Deneuve and Chiara Mastroianni as her daughter and granddaughter.

Another Emmy nomination, for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series, came for 'Mr Monk & the Lady Next Door', a Season Seven episode of Monk (2002-09) that saw the compulsive Marge Johnson becomes a surrogate mother to Tony Shalhoub's multi-phobic private eye. The following year, she made her farewell television appearance as Joann Fielding, the mother-in-law of Supervisory Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Hamill), who becomes caught up in a murder investigation in 'Mother's Day', a Season Seven episode of the long-running NCIS (2003-).

In 2011, Rowlands made a bit of cinema history when she played Tess Powell in Patrick Gilles and Hooman Khalili's Olive (2011), the story of a boy with the power to help people rediscover the fun in life that was the first full-length feature to be filmed entirely on a smartphone. The following year, Rowlands married retired businessman Robert Forrest and marked the occasion by playing Mimi in Yellow (2012), which was directed by Nick Cassavetes and co-scripted by his former partner, Heather Wahlquist, who stars as a substitute teacher troubled by an incestuous fling with her half-brother, Brendan Sexton.

In a dramatic change of tack, Rowlands used her 80th year to make her first sci-fi movie, as Esther stands by Andy (Frank Langella), a scientist who has been charged with selling state secrets, while a crisis in the Middle East edges the planet to the brink of biological warfare in Brian Horiuchi's darkly comic Parts Per Billion (2013). Sparks of a different kind flew in Arthur Allan Seidelman's adaptation of Richard Alfieri's play, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, as Lily Harrison, the widow of a Southern Baptist minister from St Petersburg Beach, Florida, struggles to adapt to the acerbic methods of gay dance instructor, Michael Minetti (Joshua Jackson). This would prove to be Rowlands's final feature, but she did find time before retiring in 2015 to play a therapist coaxing Sarah Matzkin into divulging some secrets in Troy Price's short, Unfortunate Circumstances (both 2014).

Not long after Rowlands quit acting, the Academy bestowed an honorary Oscar for the way in which she had 'illuminated the human experience through her brilliant, passionate and fearless performances'. Playwright Tennessee Williams had once compared Rowlands to a work of art that 'you place yourself in front of as if they were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers walking slowly away from you'. But New Yorker film critic, Richard Brody, put it more succinctly when he wrote, 'The most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus is Gena Rowlands.'

She died surrounded by her family at her home in Indian Wells, California on 14 August 2024. 'Artists somehow stumble onto the best life in the world,' she had once said, 'and I have no complaints.' When asked if she ever revisited the films she had made with John Cassavetes, she replied, '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.' As she told Gary Oldman, 'You know, I guess I'm the luckiest actress who ever lived. I've had maybe eight or nine great parts...and the man who wrote them and directed them loved me.'