Gena Rowlands names her favourite John Cassavetes movies: “Those are the top ones”
Independent cinema lost one of its leading lights when Gena Rowlands passed away in August 2024 at the age of 94, and the actor’s career was synonymous with the transformative work she created alongside husband and muse John Cassavetes.
The two were married from 1954 until the filmmaker’s death in 1989, and while they enjoyed plenty of success when they weren’t collaborating, their shared influence over reshaping the landscape of the American independent scene will ensure they remain forever intertwined.
Cassavetes was always in demand as an actor, and he used those opportunities to funnel funds and ambition into his secondary career behind the camera. Utilising friends, family, bank loans, remortgages, and amateur crews, the auteur developed, financially supported, and distributed his own features that gave him levels of creative freedom that very few could wield at the time.
Of course, it wasn’t without its inherent risks, but Rowlands and Cassavetes had a habit of making magic together. Between 1963’s A Child Is Waiting and 1984’s Love Streams, they made ten movies together, and their approach to realising their dream of making films without the restrictions typically imposed by the studio system gave the entire complexion of the indie scene a much-needed overhaul.
For her contributions to film and television, Rowlands was the recipient of an honorary Academy Award to go with her two competitive ‘Best Actress’ nominations for the Cassavetes-helmed A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, in addition to three Primetime Emmy wins and a pair of Golden Globe victories. Naturally, though, the formidable husband-and-wife pairing became definitive for both.
In an effort to take the moral high ground, when Matt Zoller Seitz asked Rowlands to name her favourite Cassavetes movie, she plumped for all of them, even the two she didn’t star in. “Really, though, those are the top ones for me,” she said. “Because there’s nothing like working for John.”
“Everybody loved it,” she continued. “It was not like working for anybody else, even though everybody else there was a lot of terrific, talented people who had their own way of doing it. The freedom that John gave his actors was astounding.” So astounding, it would seem, that playing favourites was out of the question.
That being said, Shadows – one of her two non-starring Cassavetes efforts alongside Too Late Blues – earned special praise for the way it outlined what would eventually become his definitive style. Although “people got the idea that the rest of his pictures were improvised” because Shadows had been, being more structured didn’t stop him from allowing “room for improvisation if the actor felt something, thought something.”
It might sound like a copout for Rowlands to call all 12 of Cassavetes’ features her favourite, but she held them every bit as close to her heart as he did. On the plus side, elaborating on the majesty of Shadows did at least ensure it wasn’t an entirely biased assessment.
