The great actress Gena Rowlands turns 90 on Friday, June 19, 2020.
Revered for her thrilling performances and collaborations with her late husband, actor/director/writer John Cassavetes (1929–1989), Rowlands received Oscar nominations for Best Actress in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980).
Rowlands, with Cassavetes, embodied the spirit of the independents by branching out from the conventional filmmaking in the late-1960s and especially 1970s with the likes of Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), and Opening Night (1977).
In A Woman Under the Influence, which nearly won her the 1974 Best Actress Oscar (she lost to Ellen Burstyn, in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but did win the Golden Globe, and one can wonder how close was that vote), Rowlands played a wife, to Peter Falk, who suffers from psychotic episodes.
She starred with actress Bette Davis in a CBS movie, Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979), as a daughter who learns she is dying and decides to try to reconnect with her mother. Rowlands had long-admired Davis (who won an Emmy for Strangers). The television film gave her the opportunity to with Davis.
In Gloria, her second Oscar nomination, Rowlands played a former showgirl and mobster’s ex-lover who has sworn to protect a 7-year-old boy after his family is murdered. Not unlike A Woman Under the Influence, it was a gutsy and unique performance, one which won Rowlands the Best Actress award from Boston Society of Film Critics.
Gena Rowlands was nominated for an Emmy, in 1986, for playing the mother to Aidan Quinn in the first-ever TV movie about AIDS, An Early Frost, which also starred another Cassavetes/Rowlands collaborator, Ben Gazzara, and was broadcast on NBC on November 11, 1985. She would go on to win four Emmys which included her first, in 1987, for playing former First Lady Betty Ford, a recovering alcoholic, in ABC’s The Betty Ford Story.
After her husband’s death, at age 59, February 3, 1989, Rowlands starred in two of her son Nick’s films, Unhook the Stars (1996), which garnered her a Best Actress nomination from the Screen Actors Guild of America, and The Notebook (2004).
In 2010, she made a memorable guest appearance, in the episode “Mother’s Day,” as the former mother-in-law to Mark Harmon’s character on CBS’s NCIS, who still grieves—and seeks revenge—for her daughter and granddaughter.
In 2015, Gena Rowlands received an Honorary Academy Award.
Born June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin, Rowlands’s father, Edwin, was a state legislator and member of the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Her daughter Alexandra, not unlike her son Nick, is also a filmmaker who directed the memorable 2004 documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Her other daughter, Zoe, is also a director (2007’s Broken English). In 2012, Rowlands married businessman Robert Forrest.
Below are video clips from Gena Rowlands’s Oscar-nominated performances in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria followed by her Honorary Academy Award speech.
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