Gena Rowlands obituary: a force of screen acting whose jagged rhythms hit raw nerves

Trying to put her in context, admirers have compared Gena Rowlands, who has died at 94, to this or that star of Hollywood’s golden age, or even found echoes among her contemporaries. But to me it was precisely her resemblance to no one, her jagged rhythms, her refusal to fit into any known category that marked her extraordinary and often discomfiting career. 

From the hysterical, desperate Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to her Rambo-like gunslinger in Gloria (1980) to her nakedly vulnerable yet incorrigibly histrionic diva in Opening Night (1977), she racked up a series of unforgettable dames with an anarchic and unpredictable presence. This owed much to that furious renegade, her husband-director John Cassavetes, the Svengali provocateur who would tear at the fabric of the well-made film like nobody else, shredding it with his teeth if necessary. 

Shadows (1958) hinted at the jazzy off-centre films to come, but it was the director’s remarkable Faces in 1968, with its almost embarrassing immediacy, that found in the music of discord some (bitter)sweet spot between chaos and poetry. Life was performance; his actors would be actorish, they wouldn’t disappear into scripted persona. I remember being stunned and delighted by Faces, stunned and thrown off by A Woman Under the Influence. I was nonplussed by Mabel’s seeming helplessness, her desperation to please. It was the era of the women’s movement; we were beginning to look at films through a feminist lens, calling out rampant sexism, while also hoping for ‘positive role models’. That was not to be Rowlands’ mission. Hers was to further disturb our sleep.

Lines between theatre and reality were blurred in Cassavetes to the point of being hopelessly and deliberately intertwined, a phenomenon only amplified by the sometime appearance of the two together. But it was Rowlands who raged and prowled front and centre as a restless creature incapable of, unwilling to, resolve the contradictions of life; of the actor’s life. Did Cassavetes invent her or did he unleash her? This wild animal always battling personal demons; her characters challenging norms of behaviour, testing the limits of what an audience would accept.

This was particularly true of Opening Night with its Pirandellian shifts and its two audiences – one in the theatre at New Haven where Myrtle’s new play is in tryout, the other we moviegoers subjected to her wild and unpredictable swings. But in Opening Night her discontent turns virulent. She dislikes the play, sabotages the production, questions lines, invents some. She scorns the theme of the ageing star – even as she herself worries that playing a menopausal woman, especially as she isn’t one yet, would put an end to her career. (This was something the real-life Rowlands needn’t have worried about: she was always working, both in film and television, and enjoyed one of the longest and richest careers of any contemporary actress.) 

Finally in the denouement she staggers on to the stage late and drunk – and gets away with it as some diabolical new version of reality is enacted between Cassavetes and herself. The fourth wall has long ago receded, and as they duke it out physically, we catch a sense of their unique and electrically pugilistic bond.

As the repository of Cassavetes’ challenges, Rowlands struck the raw nerve of our sense of being caught between two worlds: a traditional one, finding on the one hand identity through men and the movie stars we venerate, and on the other, one as yet unborn in which we would carve out ways of being more self-directed, less in thrall.

Rowlands was ‘directed’, literally by Cassavetes – give him credit for his insight, his willingness to shatter taboos on behalf of women, his tackling the theme of ageing (and including men in the equation). But she also eluded his grasp through those very acts of subversion, the way Marlene Dietrich ultimately eluded the domineering Josef von Sternberg, the artist-director who groomed and fashioned a being who would fly free of him.

Cassavetes was both sui generis and a part of something larger. The two great European films that ushered in modernism in 1960, Antonioni’s L’avventura and Godard’s Breathless, changed the language of film. They also both featured enigmatic women at the centre – Monica Vitti and Jean Seberg respectively – whose blank stare into nothingness memorably summed up the feeling of being caught between the old and the new. Rowland’s Mabel is the housewife driven mad by her yearning to please, to be what’s required, to be loved. Her Minnie in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) voices the Cassavetes credo: movies are a conspiracy that set you up to believe in love and romance.

Rowlands embodied both that yearning and its refusal. She was beautiful but lacked vanity, her head of ravishing silver blonde hair being her one concession to glamour. There seemed to be no make-up artist to soften her effect, no scriptwriter to tone down her excesses or cameraman to find the lighting and angle that would hide signs of ageing – and certainly no director to lower the emotional temperature. She trod some invisible line between reality and artifice that was all her own. And in her fearlessness she gave us something we don’t get from more empowered women of the screen: a brutal honesty about where we’ve been and the vulnerability that still lies beneath. She’s our past, but she also looks into the gaping maw of tomorrow.

• Gena Rowlands, 19 June 1930 to 14 August 2024