Gena Rowlands, who has died at the age of 94, was a highly respected actor, with a fierce, edgy, often emotionally unstable on screen presence. She often played traumatised mothers or mother figures and her characters were often tinged with a brittle abrasiveness. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1930, Rowlands began her distinguished acting career in 1956, playing opposite Edward G.
Robinson in Paddy Chayefsky’s play Middle of the Night on Broadway. After several television roles, Hollywood quickly came calling, with small roles in The High Cost of Loving (1958) and Lonely Are The Brave (1962). From that moment on, she rarely stopped working.
Along the way, she worked with some of contemporary cinema’s most esteemed figures – Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, Terence Davies and Paul Schrader. But her ten collaborations with husband John Cassavetes catapulted her to fame. Working with John Cassavetes was the pioneering independent filmmaker who made risky, edgy films and who often accepted Hollywood studio roles to secure funding for his own projects.
He and Rowlands were married in 1954 and he first directed her in the poignant drama A Child is Waiting (1963). From then until their final collaboration in the highly acclaimed Love Streams (1984), they forged a series of groundbreaking arthouse films that explored complex human relationships and emotionally intense characters. The American cinema of 1970s is often characterised as pivoting between the blockbusters of George Lucas .