Actor Gena Rowlands, who was in the entertainment industry for over six decades, died on Wednesday at the age of 94.
Gena, born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wisconsin, on 19 June, 1930, acted in theatre, TV and film, including multiple projects with her first husband, John Cassavetes.
She began her career on Broadway in plays like Middle Of The Night and The Seven Year Itch before landing television roles on series including Top Secret, Robert Montgomery Presents and Appointment With Adventure in the 1950s.
Following this, she made her film debut in 1958’s The High Cost Of Loving but continued appearing on TV in shows including 87th Precinct, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the prime-time soap Peyton Place.
Gena married her first husand in 1954 after they met at the American Academy at Carnegie Hall, where they were both students. The two were married until his death in 1989 and had three children together, Nick, Alexandra and Zoe ― now all actors and directors.
In the 1960s, Gena started a working relationship with John. Over the course of 20 years, the pair made 10 films together, including A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Machine Gun McCain (1969), Minnie And Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Two-Minute Warning (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), Tempest (1982) and Love Streams (1984).
Gena received Best Actress Oscar nominations for both A Woman Under The Influence and Gloria. She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for A Woman Under The Influence.
“We both had careers and what we would do is when we ran out of money on the movies, which was frequently, we would stop for a while and go do somebody else’s movie,” Gena told Variety in 2016 of her work with her husband on independent films.
“Then we would bring that money back. It took a long time to get our movies done.”
In 1987, she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance as Betty Ford in The Betty Ford Story. Gena also won Emmys for Face Of A Stranger (1991) and Hysterical Blindness (2003), and a Daytime Emmy for The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie (2004).
Later in her career, Rowlands starred in films including Something To Talk About (1995), Hope Floats (1998) and The Skeleton Key (2005). She also received much attention for her role in 2004’s The Notebook, which her son Nick Cassavetes directed.
And later, Gena appeared on the shows Monk and NCIS and in the 2014 movie Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks.
She married retired businessman Robert Forrest in 2012.
In 2015, she received an Honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards.
“I think one of the most wonderful things about acting is that you get to live so many lives, as in reading, too,” Gena told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “I’m sure that influenced me. I never wanted to be anything but an actress.”
Earlier this year, Gena’s son Nick disclosed that she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“I got my mum to play older Allie, and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and wanting to be authentic with it, and now, for the last five years, she’s had Alzheimer’s,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
Sara Bondioli contributed reporting.