Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Bought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Bought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

Famous for her role as a character on the verge and for her work in the film industry, she has received two Oscar awards for her roles in films written by John Cassavetes, her husband.

By Anita Gates

Aug 15, 2024 01:22 AM

Movies |Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Bought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/movies/gena-rowlands-dead.html

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It was the actress Gena Rowlands was in the 2014 film, one year before she was awarded the honorary Academy Award for her life’s work.Credit…Chris Pizzello/Invision via Associated Press

Gena Rowlands, an ferocious elegant, beautiful actor who most often working with her husband John Cassavetes, starred in an array of deeply personal independent films, died. She was 94.

It was reported by Daniel Greenberg, a representative for Ms. Rowlands’ son, the director Nick Cassavetes. There were no other details provided.

The actress. Rowlands, who often performed deranged, intoxicated or other characters on the edge she was twice nominated for the best actress Oscars for her performances produced by the director Mr. Cassavetes. The first one was for her main part for the role of “A Woman Under the Influence” in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) which was a film in the film, her insecure, desperate character is taken in with her husband of blue collar (Peter Falk) because he isn’t sure what to do. A critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times that Ms. Rowlands was “so touchingly vulnerable to every kind of influence around her that we don’t want to tap her because she might fall apart.”

Her third award was in the film “Gloria” (1980), in which she played an alleged moll for a gangster who is on the run along with the orphaned child.

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Ms. Rowlands and John Marley in “Faces,” which Renata Adler of The New York Times called “a really important movie” about “the way things are.” Like many of her movies, it was directed by Ms. Rowland’s husband, John Cassavetes.Credit…United Archives

However, it the film “Faces” (1968), in which she played an unidentified young prostitute alongside John Marley, that first attracted the Cassavetes and Rowlands partnership to the attention of filmgoers. The press proclaimed the partnership’s success; Renata Adler described the film in The New York Times as “a really important movie” about “the way things are,” and Mr. Ebert called it “astonishing.”

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