US actress Gena Rowlands passes away at age 94

According to US media sources, award-winning US actress Gena Rowlands passed away on Wednesday at the age of 94. She was most known for appearing in the films directed by her first husband, John Cassavetes.

According to US entertainment publication TMZ, Rowlands passed away at her Indian Wells, California, home surrounded by relatives.

The New York Times reported in June that although Rowlands’s son Nick Cassavetes did not immediately provide an official cause of death, she had been afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease for the previous five years.

Prior to his death in 1989, Rowlands was married to John Cassavetes for almost 35 years, during which time she acted in ten of his films.

Over the course of three decades, beginning in the 1960s, the couple developed an enthralling and explosive on-screen connection that explored themes of desire and self-destruction against a backdrop of adultery and booze.

Rowlands earned the first of two Oscar nominations for “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), capturing to devastating effect the decline of a housewife into mental illness in what is often regarded as her best work.

When he chose the actress in his 1988 film “Another Woman,” Woody Allen described her as “incapable of an unbelievable moment.”

When the two co-starred in Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth” in 1992, Winona Ryder was cited in the LA Times as saying, “Whatever I say about Gena isn’t enough because she’s so incredible.”

A legendary career

Born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisconsin, Rowlands came from a well-educated middle-class family. Her mother was a painter and part-time actor, while her father served as a state senator.

She enrolled at the American Academy of Drama in New York, where she met the gregarious and fast-talking Greek-American Cassavetes in 1953. They got married a year later.

Her memorable performances came from their partnership; “A Woman Under the Influence” was undoubtedly the best of them, and director John Cassavetes received an Oscar nomination for it as well.

Rowlands played a riveting role as Mabel, a woman driven to madness by her industrious, silent husband Peter Falk’s years of subtle, complex tyranny.

Following years of alcohol abuse, Cassavetes passed away from liver disease in 1989. Rowlands won four Emmys while working on television and continuing to make movies.

All three of her children, who were raised by Cassavetes, are now employed in the film and television industries. In 2004, she starred with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in “The Notebook,” which was directed by her son Nick.

She wed retired businessman Robert Forrest in 2012, and the same year she announced her acting retirement, she received an honorary Academy Award.