Gena Rowlands, Opening Night and The Notebook Actress, Dies at 94

Gena Rowlands, known for her wrenching and revelatory film performances—and once called the "most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus"—has died. A four-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner, she was nominated for Academy Awards for her performances in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980) and received an honorary Oscar in 2015. She died on August 14 from complications of Alzheimer's disease at her home in Indian Wells, California. She was 94.

Rowlands appeared on Broadway twice, in The Seven Year Itch and The Middle of the Night. However, she starred in two films that received major theatrical adaptations in 2024, on Broadway and in the West End: Opening Night (1977), directed by her husband John Cassavetes, and the film adaptation of The Notebook (2004), directed by her son Nick Cassavetes. 

Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisconsin. She was a sickly, shy and withdrawn child and teenager who, according to Cassavetes on Cassavetes, developed a vivid fantasy life to compensate. She moved to New York City in 1950 to study drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, taking a part-time job as an usherette at the Little Carnegie Cinema next on 57th Street, where she obsessed over Marlene Dietrich's performance in The Blue Angel.

After a year at AADA, she took a job as a seamstress (“I knew one end of a needle from another,” she said) at the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod, where she also performed small roles. She dropped out of AADA after landing the role of narrator in a half-hour musical revue, All About Love, at the Versailles nightclub on the Upper East Side.

This was followed by a stint touring with the Boston Summer Theater in Season with Ginger (later renamed Time Out for Ginger). In 1953—after a stint writing for comic books—she played one of the dream girls in the road company production of George Axelrod’s The Seven Year Itch. The following year—the year that Rowlands and Cassavetes married after four months of courtship—she made her Broadway debut when the production ran at New York’s Fulton Theater.

Rowlands was invited to read for a part in a Broadway production after the director Joshua Logan caught a minor television appearance of hers on The Goodyear Television Playhouse. The Broadway show was Paddy Chayefsky’s The Middle of the Night—her breakthrough role. The show opened at New York’s Anta Theatre (later the Virginia Theatre and now the August Wilson Theatre) in 1956.

Following The Middle of the Night, Rowlands largely concentrated on her film career, making her feature debut in The High Cost of Living (1958) before going on to make ten films with Cassavetes, including Faces (1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), Tempest (1982) and Love Streams (1984). Other major film credits include Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988) and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991). In 2004, she played Allie, a woman living with Alzheimer’s, in The Notebook.

Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 59 from complications of cirrhosis. Rowlands remarried in 2012 to retired businessman Robert Forrest.

In June, Nick told Entertainment Weekly that she had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.

Survivors include her husband, Robert, and children Nick, Alexandra and Zoe Cassavetes.