Gena Rowlands, 'Woman Under the Influence' and 'Gloria' star, dies at 94 (2024)

Gena Rowlands, the Oscar-nominated actress known for her collaborations with her first husband, the filmmaker JohnCassavetes, died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells, Calif., per PEOPLE. She was 94.

Rowlands began her career on the stage, working in repertory theater, national tours, and on Broadway. Though she had a robust television career, frequently guest-starring on the most popular shows of the 1950s and ’60s, she didn't truly break out as an actress until she began to partner with Cassavetes.

The couple, who married in 1954, made 10 films together, beginning with 1963's A Child Is Waiting, in which Rowlands has a small role as the mother of a mentally disabled child. Their other collaborations include Faces, Machine Gun McCain, Minnie and Moskowitz, Two-Minute Warning, Opening Night, Tempest, Love Streams, and her Oscar-nominated turns in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria.

She never won an Oscar (though she received an honorary award in 2015), but she did win three Emmys, including one for 1987 TV movie The Betty Ford Story, in which she portrayed the former first lady, and one for Mira Nair's Hysterical Blindness on HBO.

Rowlands continued to work well into her later years and many younger audiences will best remember her as the older version of Rachel McAdams' character, Allie, in 2004's The Notebook, which was directed by her son Nick Cassavetes. She also appeared in her daughter Zoe's film Broken English, a 2007 indie film starring Parker Posey.

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisc. Her family moved to Washington, D.C., when she was 9 years old when her father, a banker and state legislator, took a job in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She attended the University of Wisconsin for three years before moving to New York City to study drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She said that she had always wanted to be an actress.

"I began to realize that you didn’t have to just live one life, you could be a lot of people and do a lot of things, and it caught my fancy," she said in a 2015 interview for the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences web seriesAcademy Originals.

In the early ’50s, Rowlands made her Broadway debut in The Seven Year Itch and then appeared on a number of television series, including 87th Precinct, 77 Sunset Strip, Bonanza, and Alfred Hitchco*ck Presents.

From 1966 to 1968, Rowlands appeared on soap opera Peyton Place for seasons 3 and 4 as socialite Adrienne Van Leyden.

She didn't make her film debut until 1958 in The High Cost of Loving. One of her earliest notable movie roles was in 1962's Lonely Are the Brave as the former lover of Kirk Douglas' character and wife of his best friend.

The high point of her career was the string of films she made with Cassavetes from 1963 to 1984. Her performances as a mentally ill alcoholic in A Woman Under the Influence and as a gangster's girlfriend on the run in Gloria are still considered some of the best acting in modern filmmaking. Cassavetes considered Rowlands his muse. "He loved actors, and he had a particular interest in women," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. "Women in movies, I should say! He was interested in women’s problems and where they are in society and what they have to overcome. He offered me some really wonderful parts."

She also received acclaim for her starring role in 1988's Another Woman, written and directed by Woody Allen. Rowlands' Marion Post overhears another woman in psychoanalysis, sending her into her own mental spiral and existential crisis.

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Other notable projects include The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie, Something to Talk About, The Skeleton Key, and episodes of Numb3rs, Monk, and NCIS. Her final film was 2014's Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, an American-Hungarian co-production. In 2015, she declared herself essentially retired from acting.

Earlier this year, her son, Nick, revealed that Rowlands had been suffering from Alzheimer's for the last five years, a sad echo of her character in his film The Notebook.

Rowlands and JohnCassavetes, who died in 1989, also had a third child, actress and director Alexandra Cassavetes, who was among the family with Rowlands when she died, according to PEOPLE. Rowlands married businessman Robert Forrest in 2012. She is survived by her three children and Forrest.