Gena Rowlands: the fiercest, most incandescent star of US indie cinema

‘I was always a BROAD! I can’t stand the sight of MILK!” This is Gena Rowlands at her awe-inspiring toughest in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama-thriller Gloria from 1980. She is sexy, smart, a match for any man. Rowlands was a strong, passionate heroine in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. In fact, her director-husband John Cassavetes was in some ways Bogart to her Bacall. Rowlands staked a claim to the male prerogative of being sensual, dangerous and damaged; a natural survivor. In Gloria, and also in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), in which she plays a severe philosophy professor, Rowlands wears a belted trenchcoat, the kind that Bogart would wear.

Related: Gena Rowlands on the work of her husband, John Cassavetes

In recent years, Rowlands was known most widely as the sweet old lady in the tearjerking drama The Notebook (2004), being read to in a retirement home by the ageing and gallant James Garner. She was tenderly directed in this film by her son, Nick Cassavetes. For all its mawkishness, the film acquired a real fanbase, but it gives only the most oblique indication of what Rowlands was like in her magnificent, leonine prime.

Gloria is a glorious New York picture. Rowlands plays the title role, a hardbitten New York mafia girlfriend of a certain age, living on her own in an apartment near Yankee Stadium and enjoying a certain semi-protected status. Then Gloria has a midlife change of heart when her wiseguy associates show up to murder her neighbour, a mob accountant who has been ratting them out to the FBI. She goes on the run with the man’s mouthy six-year-old kid, who is now an orphan. The gangsters want his dad’s incriminating notebook, which is in the kid’s possession, and they want to kill the kid too, but Gloria succumbs to a strange motherly sentimentality rising within her, and vows to protect the bewildered boy from these bullies with the help of her snub-nosed .45 and her fists.

Her violent scenes are jaw-dropping. When she is on the street with the boy and the mobsters roll up in a big, bulky town car, Gloria is utterly unafraid, keeps them talking, then pulls out her gun and plugs two or three. The car turns over spectacularly, making its panicky getaway under Gloria’s coolly amused gaze, and then she makes her own getaway with the kid, after airily shouting “Taxi!” Later she gets into a punch-up on the subway with two ugly goons and comes out on top, jeering: “Let a woman beatcha, huh? Sissies!” Actually, she sounds more like Cagney than Bogart, and her exulting, grinning face is electrifying. There is a staggering scene in a restaurant when she threatens to kill five mafiosi at a neighbouring table and then makes her escape with the kid out through the kitchen. (My theory is that this gripping scene inspired the tracking-shot-through-the-kitchen sequence in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas.)

Perhaps Rowlands’ greatest movie was the colossally, almost unbearably emotional A Woman Under the Influence (1974), also directed by John Cassavetes. It is an operatic, all-stops-out study in family breakdown. Rowlands plays Mabel, a beautiful, vulnerable woman with bipolar disorder; her uncomprehending husband, Nick, is played by a garrulous Peter Falk . The movie has an inspirationally simple three-act structure: in the first, Mabel has an episode while in the house on her own, gets drunk, brings home another man from a bar while her husband and kids are away, and then embarrasses Nick horribly when he brings all his buddies home for lunch. In act two, the increasingly manic Nick imitates what was said about TS Eliot by Edith Sitwell: he goes mad and has his wife committed. Left with their kids, he becomes increasingly crazed, in denial about the horror, insisting at one stage on taking the children for a brief and horribly joyless trip to the beach. In the third, devastating act, Mabel comes home after six months in the psychiatric hospital, and Nick’s folks have somehow insisted on a noisy family welcome-home party that is precisely the sort of thing that tipped her over the edge in the first place.

It is not quite right to call Rowlands’s performance subtle: she is vehement, fierce and compelling – yet none of these things preclude an attention to detail and plausible reality. And when she comes to apologise to her children at the end, it is heartwrenching.

A subtler and more difficult-to-read performance came in Cassavetes’ breakthrough movie Faces (1968). Rowlands plays Jeannie Rapp, a single “good time” girl forever having to be bubbly, tolerant and fun when deeply depressed married men get drunk and show up late at her apartment (ostensibly to hang out, the nature of Jeannie’s semi-professional income being a diplomatic open secret), frantically trying to distract themselves from the unhappiness of their marriages and their lives. Theirs are the gargoyle “faces” of the movie, distorted with panic and suppressed pain. Jeannie is heroically good-tempered in the face of these poor souls.

Rowlands’ other great performance was in the fascinating Opening Night (1977), a movie which is like a very dark version of All About Eve. She plays Myrtle, an established stage star in the late summer of her career, and Cassavetes (who also directs) plays her male co-star. About to embark on the delicate career stage of playing older characters, Myrtle witnesses a besotted teenage fan, the very image of her younger self, get killed by a car outside the theatre. It tips her into a very complex, slow-motion crisis. It is another superbly intelligent, detailed, accomplished performance from Rowlands.

In Cassavetes’s extravagantly emotional and experimental Love Streams (1984), Rowlands returned to playing a woman with bipolar disorder. Sarah Lawson is separated from her daughter after a divorce, and goes to live with her brother Robert (Cassavetes), a wealthy author who is an alcoholic and womaniser, and maintains a seedy and chaotic retinue of female “assistants” in his house. Like Sarah, he is divorced and alienated from his child, and these two lonely damaged souls find unexpected solace in each other’s company. (The movie may have inspired Abi Morgan’s screenplay for Steve McQueen’s Shame in 2011, with Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan.) As Love Streams progresses, poor Sarah begins to be swallowed into a manic fantasy life. Bizarrely, she buys a menagerie of animals to keep her brother company – there is an extraordinary scene as the miniature horses are led through his louche bachelor pad. In one of her weird dreams, Sarah somersaults into a swimming pool in front of her husband and daughter and in another she sings along to a choreographed children’s ballet that offers her a vision of peaceful acceptance. It is another utterly startling, passionate performance.

Rowlands had a rich and varied career, working with directors such as Terence Davies and Jim Jarmusch – and playing opposite her heroine Bette Davis in the 1979 TV movie Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter. But her greatest roles were with John Cassavetes: they were the loves of each others’ lives and it suffused Rowlands’ performances with something incandescent.