November 4 at 8pm ET
Gena Rowlands always wanted to be an actress. Born Virginia Rowlands in Wisconsin in 1930, some of her favorite movie actors while growing up were Edward G. Robinson and Bette Davis. Years later, she would act with both and her fearless dedication to her craft would be favorably compared with Davis'. As Rowlands told The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ program “Academy Originals,” acting made her “realize that you didn’t have to just live one life; you could be a lot of people and do a lot of things.” On November 4, TCM pays tribute to Rowlands and her exemplary talent.
Many actors have endured difficult childhoods, but Rowlands grew up in an unusually happy home with loving and supportive parents. Her mother, Mary Allen Neal, was an artist, and her father, E.M. Rowlands, was a Wisconsin State Representative who later joined the Department of Agriculture during the Franklin Roosevelt administration. The new job necessitated a move to Washington, D.C., which was a new cultural world for Rowlands, who was barely in her teens.
It was in Washington that she saw her first British film, began to act in community theater at the age of 14 and won a scholarship to the Jarvis Repertory Theatre. She returned home in 1947 to attend the University of Wisconsin but left in her junior year to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) in New York. Rowlands told Scott Feinberg of “The Hollywood Reporter” in 2015 that she had no intention of marrying or having children as she was dedicated to her craft. But while auditioning in 1953, she met AADA alumni and Broadway assistant stage manager John Cassavetes, who fell in love at first sight. The two married in 1954. Unlike many showbiz couples, especially those who worked so closely together, they stayed married until his death in 1989.
Rowlands’ Broadway career was on the rise when she understudied for “The Seven Year Itch” before taking over the role and embarking on a tour. In 1956, she co-starred with childhood favorite Edward G. Robinson in the play “Middle of the Night,” although the film role would go to the better-known Kim Novak. By 1957, she had appeared in several early television series, like “Top Secret” and “Robert Montgomery Presents,” before she went to Hollywood to make her film debut in The High Cost of Loving (1958).
Like many post-war films, The High Cost of Loving, directed by and starring José Ferrer, was about upwardly mobile men in corporate America. In the film, Jim Fry (Ferrer) panics when he is accidentally left off the guest list for lunch with his company president. To make matters worse, the company is going through a merger and downsizing when his wife (Rowlands) reveals she’s pregnant after nine years of infertility. “New York Times” film critic Bosley Crowther compared The High Cost of Loving unfavorably to an episode of “I Love Lucy” and the film didn't do much at the box office or for Rowlands' career.
Life followed art in 1959 when Rowlands gave birth to her first child, future director Nick Cassavetes. While she worked in television after the birth of her son, most notably in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” Rowland would not return to film until the modern Western, Lonely Are the Brave (1962), opposite Kirk Douglas. Cowboy Jack Burns (Douglas) deliberately gets himself thrown in jail with his friend Paul Bondi (Michael Kane), to help him escape. Douglas wanted to cast Eva Marie Saint as Paul’s wife, with whom Jack is having an affair, but Saint was unavailable. Rowlands got the role only a week before production began. Although it opened to critical approval on May 24, 1962, audiences stayed away.
Another disappointment was the Cassavetes-directed film A Child is Waiting (1963), in which Rowlands played the mother of a child attending an institution for emotionally and intellectually challenged children, opposite Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. Producer Stanley Kramer recut the film, which Cassavetes felt completely changed the point of the story. An argument ensued and the two came to blows. Cassavetes' temporary banishment from Hollywood became the catalyst for Rowlands and Cassavetes’s decision to make independent films. Sometimes Rowlands would work while Cassavetes wrote scripts and took care of their now three children, and sometimes they would switch. Like Orson Welles before them, Rowlands and Cassavetes would take Hollywood jobs to earn money to make their own films, which Rowlands described to “Academy Originals” in 2016 as “a tricky life, but it’s so exciting and wonderful because you’re doing what you really want to do.”
Rowlands’ and Cassavetes’ films were often shot in their own home and co-starred friends and family members, as in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), which featured both of their mothers, Mary Allen “Lady” Rowlands and Katherine Cassavetes. The self-funded A Woman Under the Influence (1974) was Rowlands’ personal favorite because she loved working with close friend Peter Falk, who played the husband with whom her mentally ill character, Mabel, is obsessed. She told actor Gary Oldman in his 2001 article for “Venice Magazine” that she saw first-hand how the film affected audiences. “When people see you on film, you are very unprotected. You reveal a lot about yourself. And they will tell you things about themselves: they’ll come up and say, ‘I didn’t know this was going on in anybody else’s house. This was my mother. I didn’t know.’ What an enormous honor it is for another person, who is a stranger, to sit down and share the most intimate part of their lives.”
A Woman Under the Influence received excellent reviews from critics when it premiered at the New York Film Festival in October 1974, but no studio offered to distribute it because they thought that audiences wouldn’t care about “women’s problems.” Rowlands and Cassavetes distributed the film themselves in Los Angeles and New York, and the gamble paid off. Rowlands won a Golden Globe for Best Actress and received an Academy Award nomination in the same category. The Golden Globes and the Academy nominated Cassavetes for Best Director.
Gloria (1980) gave Rowlands another chance to work with Cassavetes. In her interview with Matt Zoller Seitz for RogerEbert.com, Rowlands said that she got the part when another actress felt it wasn’t glamourous enough for her fans. Likewise, Cassavetes wasn’t the first choice for director. Rowlands loved the script, which she considered a gangster comedy, but had to talk Cassavetes into directing. Rowlands plays Gloria Swenson, a former gangster’s moll who goes on the run with her murdered friend's son, Phil (John Adames), after his entire family is killed in revenge for Phil's mob accountant father (Buck Henry) turning FBI informant. Gloria would tie with Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) for the Golden Lion Award for Best Picture. Rowlands would also receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. She would often say, as she did to Seitz, that she considered her Cassavetes’ films to be the best of her career, “Because the freedom John gave his actors was astounding. [...] It felt like it was all happening around you, not like you were making a movie.”
In 1992, Rowlands starred alongside Winona Ryder in the anthology film Night on Earth. Written, directed and produced by Jim Jarmusch, the film explores the various conversations and connections made by a passenger and taxi driver in five different locations on the same night. Rowlands plays a Hollywood casting agent who enjoys a friendly conversation with her driver, played by Ryder, as they discuss their careers and ambitions. Ryder later cited Rowlands’ influence in 2024 during her visit to the Criterion Closet. “Gena Rowlands is, I think, the greatest actress I’ve ever seen,” Ryder stated. She recalled childhood memories of seeing Rowlands’s work for the first time while her mother was a projectionist. “I remember watching Gena, and I just wanted to do what she was doing.”
Rowlands received several Emmy nominations and won four for her work in television: Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Special for the TV movies The Betty Ford Story (1987) and Face of a Stranger (1991); Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Mini-Series or Movie for Hysterical Blindness (2002); and a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performer in a Children/Youth/Family Special for The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie (2003). Among her several Golden Globe nominations was the Martha Coolidge-directed Crazy in Love (1992), for which she was nominated for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Pictures Made for Television.
For younger audiences, she is perhaps best known for her role as an elderly woman in The Notebook (2004), directed by her son, Nick, and co-starring James Garner, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. Rowlands spoke to “O: The Oprah Magazine” in 2004 about the difficulty in playing the role. “I play a character who has Alzheimer's. I went through that with my mother, and if Nick hadn't directed the film, I don't think I would have gone for it—it's just too hard. It was a tough but wonderful movie.” Rowlands would eventually be diagnosed and succumb to the disease herself on August 14, 2024, at the age of 94.
Shortly before she retired from acting, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented Rowlands an Honorary Academy Award for her body of work in 2015.
