With the death this week of Gena Rowlands, the legendary 1970s actress and, arguably, first indie It girl avant la lettre , American cinema has lost the last remaining member of the Cassavetes school. Like the collaborators preceding her, including her husband, director/writer/actor John Cassavetes, and actors Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel, Rowlands helped to define the rough-hewn fringes of American independent filmmaking in the post-Godard era. Rowlands was the only woman in this New Hollywood boys’ club at a time in which sexual politics might have aspired toward transformation, but the vested power of the male imagination had not.
The result was Rowlands’s recurring portrayal of disreputable, and disenchanted, women: a call girl, a mentally fractured housewife, a violent mafia moll, a fading stage actress, and a directionless divorcée—characters often stripped of their security, sanity, and selfhood and pushed to the psychic edges by male antagonists. And, despite Rowlands’s powerful performances, she never quite attained the mainstream visibility of female contemporaries like Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Ellen Burstyn, and Faye Dunaway . Indeed, Rowlands was, in many ways, a figure always on the edge of the screen, a face caught in half-shadow, a woman on the verge.
This is perhaps on no better display than in the Rowlands/Cassavetes films Faces (1968) and Love Streams (1984), unofficial bookends of their work together. (While the two of them had app.