Gena Rowlands, an honorary Oscar recipient best known for her groundbreaking screen collaborations with her husband, actor and director John Cassavettes, and as the Alzheimer’s-afflicted woman being told a story of forbidden young love in The Notebook, died Wednesday in her California home, TMZ reports. She was 94.
Rowlands’ son, Nick Cassavettes—who directed The Notebook—revealed in June of 2024 that Rowlands, like her character in the film, was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. “She’s in full dementia,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “And it’s so crazy—we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
Rowlands “always, always wanted to be an actress,” she said in a 2015 interview for the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences web series Academy Originals. “I began to realize that you didn’t have to just live one life, you could be a lot of people and do a lot of things, and it caught my fancy.”
That sounds glamorous. But the signature roles John Cassavettes created for her were gritty and emotional character studies of women on the fringes and on the edge: a prostitute without the Hollywood requisite heart of gold in Faces, a wife and mother who comes undone in A Woman Under the Influence, and a gangster’s moll who reluctantly protects a young boy from the mob in Gloria. The latter two performances earned her Oscar nominations.
Rowlands was a character actor who could carry a film. She gave an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performance in the 1987 made-for-TV The Betty Ford Story, and won an Emmy as a wife left destitute by her recently-deceased husband’s gambling in the 1991 TV movie Face of a Stranger.
But she was always a welcome and elevating presence in supporting roles. Cate Blanchett said as much while introducing Rowlands at the 2015 Governor’s Award ceremony where she received her honorary Oscar: “The intense authenticity and the immediacy of her acting seems to me to be the closest that anyone has ever come to capturing on film that presence of a live stage performance.”
Rowlands was an original. Playwright Tennessee Williams compared her to “a work of art you place yourself in front of as if they were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers walking slowly away from you.” She cited as an influence Bette Davis, with whom she costarred in the TV film Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter. (“The pairing is almost too good to be true, but the reality is even better,” praised critic Sheila O’Malley). Rowlands said she responded to Davis’ independence in playing characters that did not fit the norm or stereotype. “In those days,” she told Academy Originals, “women were expected to be sweet and obedient, and that just wasn’t what I was interested in. And Bette was always playing something that had a lot of bite to it.”
Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born June 19, 1930 in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, served in the state Assembly and Senate before joining Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the Department of Agriculture. Her mother, Mary Allan Neal, acted under the name Lady Rowlands, portraying Gena’s onscreen mother in three Cassavettes films.
Rowlands left the University of Wisconsin before graduating so she could move to New York to pursue her acting career. “I just couldn’t wait anymore to go be an actress,” she told Interview Magazine in 2016. “I’d wanted to be one all my life. So I went home and I told my mom and she said, ‘Huh, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!’ And I told my father and he literally said, ‘I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.’ That is how strictly I was brought up.”
She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met Cassavettes. Upon seeing her for the first time, he reportedly told a friend, “I’m going to marry her.”