Perhaps Gena Rowlands was born in the wrong decade. With her classic elegance that always showed a defiance of social etiquette, a glamour that never outshone the intelligence beneath the surface – you could also call it down-to-earthness – and her scratchy quick wit, she would have easily been in a category with stars like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Carole Lombard.
But Rowlands came to film a few years too late, and she only saw her great role models in the rearview mirror. In 1979, she did play Davis’ daughter in the TV movie “Strangers.” So Gena Rowlands ultimately had no choice but to make the 1970s her decade.
In 1954, it was not yet clear what course this unique career would take. That year, she married the slightly older John Cassavetes, whom she had met at drama school. They remained a couple until his death in 1989 – and equal partners on the set. In the history of cinema, the names Cassavetes and Rowlands are inextricably linked, although the symbiotic relationship between the two has always given rise to speculation.
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Was John Cassavetes a brilliant director or was it Rowlands’ neurotic, volatile and highly sensitive acting that made their joint films “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), “Opening Night” (1977) and “Gloria” (1980) masterpieces? She received two Oscar nominations for her roles as the mentally ill housewife Mabel and as the “gangster’s bride” (Gloria about Gloria – but also the German nonsense title), with which she leaned far outside the repertoire of their joint films.
The fact is that neither the director nor his leading actress were ever as good without the other as they were together. After her husband’s death, she worked with Woody Allen, Paul Schrader and her son Nick Cassavetes, among others.
Radically independent women
After drama school, Rowlands, who was born in rural Wisconsin in 1930, first acted on Broadway in the 1950s. Her first appearances were in television series such as “77 Sunset Strip,” “Bonanza” and “Top Secret.” Everything changed with the vérité drama “Faces” (1968), her first real role in a Cassavetes film, which was already influenced by the independent cinema of the East Coast.
Rowlands has only a few scenes in the raw, improvised marital drama – as a sex worker who is drawn against her will into the male protagonist’s drunken tour de force. But her fragile emotional balancing act in a film with a lot of screaming, told with aggressive close-ups and abrupt cuts, paved the way for a collaboration unique in Hollywood cinema.
Sunglasses and lipstick are the secret.
Gena Rowlands about her acting career
In “A Woman Under the Influence,” Rowlands plays Mabel, the wife of a kind-hearted but emotionally limited construction worker, played by Peter Falk, who becomes increasingly helpless – and violent – in response to his wife’s increasingly erratic behavior. Is Mabel a danger to herself and those around her, or is she simply creating her own reality within the rigid social construct of marriage? In the meantime, Mabel ends up in a clinic, but Rowlands’ performance defies classic pathological criteria; in a better world, she might be a free and radically independent woman.
© imago images/Mary Evans
Such ambivalences have always been the focus of discussions about female subjectivity in Cassavetes’ films. And Rowlands was always the focus, whose “women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” – the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar dedicated his moving melodrama “All About My Mother” to her 25 years ago – became a real obsession for her husband.
It is thanks in no small part to Gena Rowland’s subtle and life-affirming acting that Cassavetes has often been read as a “women’s director” – although the feminist punk band Le Tigre asked “What’s your take on Cassavetes?” – What do you think of Cassavetes? “Genius? Misogynist?”
Best Role as Gangster’s Wife
Gena Rowlands always insisted that her characters were the work of her husband; they were a testament to his love. And indeed, Mabel, Myrtle (her diva in a life crisis from “Opening Night”) and Gloria – without false kitsch, uncompromising, simply moving in their unprotected humanity – are among the most convincing portraits of women in the New Hollywood era, on the periphery of which Cassavetes’ films are located.
“Sunglasses and lipstick are the secret,” she once self-ironically summed up her career. The sentence could also be written above what is probably her most beautiful film, because it so vehemently contradicts the stereotype of the other Cassavetes films. In “Gloria,” Gena Rowlands plays the girlfriend of a mobster who suddenly discovers her maternal feelings when the gangsters kill the neighboring family and their young son is the only survivor.
So Gloria takes on the New York underground, shooting her way out. The thriller still has the heart of Cassavetes, who spent his life making dysfunctional family films. But Rowlands – sunglasses, suit, high heels, revolver in her handbag – has burned herself into Hollywood memory with this performance. On August 14, one of the most influential American actresses died at the age of 94 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.