Gena Rowlandsan honorary Oscar winner best known for her dazzling on-screen collaborations with her husband, actor and director John Cassavetesand for her role as a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who is told the story of a young forbidden love in Never Forgetdied Wednesday at her California home, reports TMZShe was 94 years old.
Gena Rowlands’ son, Nick Cassaveteswho directed The Notebook, revealed in June 2024 that his mother suffers from Alzheimer’s, like her character in the film. “I asked my mother to play old Allie, and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and trying to be authentic. And now, for the last five years, she’s had Alzheimer’s,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly. She’s in a complete dementia. And it’s so crazy – we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s our turn to live it.”
Power of interpretation
Rowlands “always, always wanted to be an actor,” she said in a 2015 interview for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ web series Academy Originals. “I started to realize that you don’t have to live one life, that you can be multiple people and do multiple things, and that resonated with me.”
It may sound glamorous. But the iconic roles that John Cassavetes created for her were mostly borderline and marginal characters: a tormented prostitute in Facesa wife and mother stifled by the norms in A Woman Under the Influenceand a call girl close to the gangsters who reluctantly protects a young boy from the mafia in Gloria. These last two performances earned him Oscar nominations.
Back then, women were expected to be meek and obedient, and that wasn’t what interested me.
Gena Rowlands was able to carry a film with her powerful and nuanced portrayal of a character. She won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the 1987 TV movie Betty Ford, wife of the presidentand an Emmy for the 1991 television movie Face of a Stranger, in which she played a woman left destitute by her recently deceased husband’s gambling debts.
Moreover, she has always allowed her supporting roles to shine. Cate Blanchett said when introducing her at the 2015 Governor’s Awards ceremony where she received her honorary Oscar: “The intense authenticity and immediacy of her acting feels to me closer to a live performance on stage than to an emotion captured on film.”
Inspired by Bette Davis
Gena Rowlands was unique. The playwright Tennessee Williams compared it to “a work of art that you stand in front of as if it were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers who are slowly moving away from you.” She cited as an influence Bette Daviswith whom she played in the TV movie Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter. (“The couple is almost too good to be true, but the reality is even better,” critic Sheila O’Malley said.) The actress said she echoed Bette Davis’ independence by playing characters who didn’t fit the norm or stereotype. “At the time,” she told Academy Originals, “women were expected to be meek and obedient, and that wasn’t what I was interested in. Bette was always playing something that had a lot of bite.”
