Gena Rowlands, the Oscar-nominated actress best known for the numerous films she worked on with her husband, director John Cassavetes, has died at the age of 94, her son Nick Cassavetes announced on Wednesday. In 2024, Nick announced that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

She was a successful actress before and after her films with John Cassavetes, but her career was shaped by the films she made with her husband, who became an actor and later a director. In Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980) and Love Streams (1984), Rowlands played a series of groundbreaking roles as wounded and yearning women in emotionally committed portrayals that were all too rare in American cinema of the era. As she told the Guardian in 2001, “It was considered embarrassing for an older woman to have anything to say about emotional things.”

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1930, Rowlands earned a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1953. At her audition, she met Cassavetes, who was studying there. They married within a year and both worked as actors on stage and screen. Rowlands made her Broadway debut in 1956 opposite Edward G. Robinson in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night, and in 1959 she guest-starred in Johnny Staccato, the police drama in which Cassavetes played the lead role.

Cassavetes became interested in directing and in 1958 he completed the groundbreaking New Wave film Shadows, which had grown out of acting workshops he had organised. Rowlands did not appear in Shadows but was given a small role in A Child Is Waiting, Cassavetes’s third film as director, over which he fell out with producer Stanley Kramer. After this, Cassavetes and Rowlands decided to work independently of Hollywood and Faces, released in 1968, was a decisive step forward. In the film, which was hailed as a caustically realistic study of a failed marriage, Rowlands played a sex worker who is hired by her unhappy husband John Marley.

Rowlands followed with a series of roles in films directed by Cassavetes. In Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Rowlands was an art gallery curator recovering from a breakup who meets and is pursued by the eccentric Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel); in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), for which she and Cassavetes both received Oscar nominations, she is a married woman who suffers a breakdown. In Opening Night (1977), she played a stage actress with a mental illness; and in Gloria (1980), for which she received an Oscar nomination for second best actress, she played the ex-girlfriend of a gangster who takes a young boy, the only survivor of a Mafia attack on their neighbors, on the run. Her last film with Cassavetes was Love Streams (1984), in which she played the divorced sister of Cassavetes’ alcoholic husband.

During Cassavetes’ illness-plagued final years and until his death in 1989, Rowlands pursued a parallel career in television, winning recognition for roles in such television dramas as Thursday’s Child and The Betty Ford Story. She also began to establish herself in the film industry, playing a philosophy professor in emotional crisis in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), Winona Ryder’s taxi passenger in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), and Aunt Mae in Terence Davies’ 1995 adaptation of The Neon Bible. She also appeared in films directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, including She’s So Lovely (1997), a love triangle drama based on a screenplay by John Cassavetes, and the cult romance The Notebook (2004), starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling. Rowlands also appeared in another of her children’s films, Broken English (2007), the film debut of Zoe Cassavetes, starring Parker Posey.

Rowlands leaves behind three children, Nick, Alexandra (also a filmmaker) and Zoe. In 2012 she married Robert Forrest for the second time. In 2015 she received an honorary Oscar.