The great Gena Rowlands has passed away

Muse and companion of John Cassavetes, this immense actress will have left her mark on independent cinema from the 70s to the present day.

Daughter of a Wisconsin politician, raised in a refined and elegant environment, Virginia Rowlands was fascinated by Bette Davis from a very early age. This is what made her decide at a very young age to leave her province to go to New York and take acting lessons. It was there that she met the seductive Cassavetes in the early 50s. And her life was about to change. In her essential book on the actress, Murielle Joudet recalls Rowlands's words:

It will be the opposite, of course. After starting out on Broadway, the actress found herself in Hollywood in the early 1960s. Her appearances in series or studio films (in Only the untamed arethe beautiful western by David Miller, she stands up to Kirk Douglas while in Tony Rome is dangerousit's Frank Sinatra who runs after her…) do not allow us to measure the power of her talent. Her crazy incandescence and her magnetism would not blossom until the early 70s. It was at that time that she became the central heroine of Cassavetes' cinema. Together, Rowlands and Cassavetes would shoot ten films, starting with A Child Is Waiting (1963), in which she played the role of the mother of a mentally handicapped child. Then she would be, among other things, Minnie Mouse in Minnie and Moskowitzthe fabulous Myrtle ofOpening Nightas well as the heroine ofA woman under the influence and especially of Gloriafor which she was nominated for an Oscar.

These are the great melodramas that will indeed reveal all the facets of her electric talent, the different faces of her totally original personality. Love, violence, trafficking of feelings, Rowlands goes through all the registers in these films that mix genres, diffract fiction with the help of documentary techniques. Always captured by the free and loving camera of her husband, her sensitivity, her emotional power, her melancholic rage (which sometimes recalls the cold beauty of Romy Schneider), will never have found such a beautiful setting. A filmmaker who films the woman he loves, that sometimes makes a beautiful film. Gloriabut above all Opening Night Or Love Streams in which the couple perform without a safety net, are as much character studies as documentaries about Rowlands – and are authentic masterpieces.

Between the cigarettes, the alcohol, the laughter and the screams, at the heart of these films there is Rowlands, nuclear reactor of this cinema in fusion, terribly incandescent, where everything runs on energy. A work where the actress seems to burn herself in each shot, and often seeks to take the world into her own fall. If Cassavetes' cinema was “a cinema of the body”, Rowlands was its purest, most perfect, most accomplished incarnation.

Without wanting to reduce it to its couple, this crazy matrix of American indie cinema remains exemplary. Rowlands/Cassavetes is the longevity and exemplarity of Joanne Woodward/Paul Newman with the artistic accomplishment of Diane Keaton/Woody Allen coupled with a unique posterity. Their power on screen comes first and foremost from what this fiercely outside-the-system couple embodied for three decades: the requirement, the emotional closeness (favoring spontaneity and improvisation), the autofiction, the poetic naturalism…

After Cassavetes' death, the actress became rarer. However, her career did not end there. She appeared in Jim Jarmusch and Terence Davies' films (like a Cassavetes fetish), but it was mainly for her children that she agreed to come out of retirement. She played in her son Nick Cassavetes' films, notably in the beautiful Never forget heartbreaking melodrama that once again featured a timeless love story.