Award-Winning Actor Gena Rowlands Dies

Actor Gena Rowlands, who was in the entertainment industry for over six decades, died on Wednesday at the age of 94.

Rowlands, born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 19, 1930, acted in theater, TV and film, including multiple projects with her first husband, John Cassavetes.

She started her career on Broadway in plays like “Middle of the Night” and “The Seven Year Itch” before landing television roles on series including “Top Secret,” “Robert Montgomery Presents” and “Appointment With Adventure” in the 1950s.

Rowlands made her film debut in 1958’s “The High Cost of Loving” but continued appearing on TV in shows including “87th Precinct,” “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” and the prime-time soap “Peyton Place.”

Rowlands married Cassavetes in 1954 after they met at the American Academy at Carnegie Hall, where they were both students. The two were married until his death in 1989 and had three children together, Nick, Alexandra and Zoe ― now all actors and directors.

In the 1960s, Rowlands started a working relationship with Cassavetes. Over the course of 20 years, the pair made 10 films together, including “A Child Is Waiting” (1963), “Faces” (1968), “Machine Gun McCain” (1969), “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971), “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), “Two-Minute Warning” (1976), “Opening Night” (1977), “Gloria” (1980), “Tempest” (1982) and “Love Streams” (1984).

Rowlands received Best Actress Oscar nominations for both “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Gloria.” She won the Golden Globe for Best Actress for “A Woman Under the Influence.”

“We both had careers and what we would do is when we ran out of money on the movies, which was frequently, we would stop for a while and go do somebody else’s movie,”