Five unmissable Gena Rowlands performances: from Opening Night to A Woman Under the Influence
Hardly any actress you might name in the history of Hollywood took the risks Gena Rowlands did. She burrowed down to the raw nerves of her characters, and triumphed as women who could be deeply deluded, while also not suffering fools. Her acting had a febrile strength – you would never want to mess with anyone she played. Twice, in films by her husband, John Cassavetes, she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar: one of these turns is below, the other is Gloria (1980). She’s certainly one of the greatest performers never to win – a oversight they recognised with an honorary Oscar in 2015.
5. The Skeleton Key (2006)
There’s a wicked tartness to Rowlands’s supporting turn here, in an underrated horror-thriller from The Wings of the Dove director Iain Softley. She plays Violet Devereaux, matron of a Louisiana plantation house, whose husband (John Hurt) has been paralysed; Kate Hudson is the hired nurse who thinks hoodoo is at work. Violet is stubborn, suspicious, obstructive, and generally a nightmare to deal with – but her flirtations with Peter Sarsgaard as the family lawyer are comically ripe, and her ways of gaining the upper hand can be quite devilish. She adds a huge amount to the film with her citrussy take on the role. (Available to rent from Apple/Amazon Prime Video/Sky)
4. Opening Night (1977)
This is now considered a classic Rowlands turn in a classic film by Cassavetes – iconic enough to inspire the recent West End musical with Sheridan Smith, even if the adaptation was misjudged. On the film’s unveiling, though, no distributor would touch it, and Cassavetes had to arrange for a self-funded release. Myrtle Gordon is an actress in freefall, on the cusp of a stage premiere that could make or break her. Rowlands shows her fending off her demons but also feeding off them, and reaching for the bottle in ways which alarm her collaborators, and us, too. (Available in a dual edition DVD/Blu-ray from BFI)
3. Love Streams (1984)
Cassavetes’s last independent feature and final collaboration with Rowlands was the strangest and most intense. They star together, not as husband and wife, but brother and sister, in a drama of escalating surrealism about two people trying to save each other. “I’m almost not crazy now,” says Rowlands’ Sarah on the phone to her husband, after we’ve learned that she visits other people’s sick relatives. She’ll go solo bowling in a cocktail dress, brings a ridiculous menagerie of animals home, and has an indelible scene travelling to Paris with more luggage than could fit into a van. It is bizarre and wonderful. (Available on DVD/Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection)
2. Another Woman (1988)
If you went hunting for the finest performance in a Woody Allen film, this would easily crack the top five. Rowlands bequeaths a subtle masterclass as Marion, a philosophy professor whose accidental eavesdropping on Mia Farrow’s therapy sessions prompts a sudden set of reflections on her own life – a self-questioning fugue. In the film’s most unnerving scene, she bumps into a high-school friend (Sandy Dennis) who dumps a shocking checklist of grievances in her lap. Marion’s long-held view of herself is revealed as a kind of mirage – and no one’s better than Rowlands at suggesting the ground beneath a person turning to quicksand. (Available on DVD/Blu-ray from MGM)
1. A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Mabel Longhetti, the wife of Peter Falk’s brutish construction foreman, is the cornerstone of Rowlands’s legacy, a character of so many manic facets it’s like watching her play all the roles in a Eugene O’Neill play at once. She received the first of her Oscar nominations and was unlucky not to win. Indeed, in an infamous and not at all complimentary review, Pauline Kael said her performance was enough “for a whole row of Oscars”. We get tired out watching Mabel before and after she’s sectioned, it’s true, but imagine being her. It fell to Rowlands to do exactly this imagining, in an astonishing, high-wire feat of empathy. (Available to rent from Apple/Amazon Prime Video/Sky)
