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Early into their 35-year-long marriage, John Cassavetes taught Gena Rowlands to speak Greek. If the two ever found themselves miserable in a crowd, Rowlands could use certain words or phrases as a private signal for them to get the hell out of there. She could openly say, in Greek, “Let’s scram,” and they’d slink away, no one the wiser. An endearing anecdote, yes, but also a key for my own understanding of the way their universe operated as director and actor, as husband and wife — adhering to a specific and insular code they valued as truth and that no one else need understand. “We keep learning how to play together,” Cassavetes said in a 1971 interview with Playboy, “so I can step on her toes gently and she can step on mine and we can make a lot of noise.” And make a lot of noise they did.
Gena Rowlands met John Cassavetes while studying drama at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts, both struggling actors on the cusp of their careers. She was radiantly beautiful, sensitive, intelligent, artistic, and as fiercely independent as she was talented. He was a handsome, hot-blooded bachelor with passion that bordered on madness and a brilliance bubbling beneath the surface just waiting for its outlet. But just like the profound yet strenuous relationships that would come to act as a through-line to all of his films, he and Rowlands’ relationship wasn’t always easy. Cassavetes was feverishly jealous and possessive; she was driven and autonomous. For their entire life of love and work, the one constant that remained between them was how different they were, their ideals of lifestyle and taste contrasting in just about every way. Yet for what ever disparity lingered between them, it wasn’t what they thought or felt that brought them together and made their relationship so fascinating, but rather the ways they chose to express those feelings and their vast capacity to do so.
John and Gena’s cinematic collaboration began in 1968 with Faces (his second) and lasted until 1984’s Love Streams (his second-to-last), with Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, and Gloria in between. His biting first foray into withering male-female relationship dramas, Faces, a movie about the disintegration of a marriage, featured Rowlands in the role of a young prostitute — a casting decision made after she expressed she rather play a more independent woman than a desperate housewife. In spite of that, their most revered collaboration came in 1974 with Rowlands in the role of Mabel Longhetti, a housewife amidst an emotional breakdown, in A Woman Under the Influence, which celebrates its 40th anniversary today.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAmO7GxJQ4o]Choreographer and dancer Pina Bausch famously said, “I’m not interested in how people move but what moves them.” I’ve found that the films of Cassavetes echo a similar sentiment, existing in a world of his own creation — one that unapologetically explored not only what it means to be human and to love, but how that feels. “We need love like food, water and air, and we don’t know how to get it,” said Cassavetes, whose work was perennially imbued by rigorous matters of the heart. “And that’s our struggle.” His onscreen relationships expressed the great labors of love, the enduring plight of everyday existence, and the explosive collision that comes when lives intertwine. But for Cassavetes, one of his greatest and most complex roles was as husband to Gena Rowlands, the woman who became not only the soul of his work, but the physical embodiment of that overwhelming emotion he wished to express.
Often when watching Rowlands onscreen, I find myself in tears, totally exhausted just by observing anything she does. Whether it be pulling a drag from a cigarette, lugging a suitcase, hopping around on one foot, bowling in stockings, or simply holding a telephone, her presence is electric, and even the most subtle movements filled with palpable emotional resonance. Above being simply an actor, Rowlands is a very athletic performer — trained, tortured, studied, and utterly devoted to her craft, her characters, and a fearless honesty in storytelling. And in playing the fragile and vulnerable Mabel, the world — and Cassavetes himself — understood for the first time just how powerful she could be.
Originally conceived as a stage play, A Woman Under the Influence was written for Rowlands, who missed her early days in theater. But after Cassavetes finished writing the script, Rowlands realized she would be “dead in two weeks if I played this on stage every night.” With their own money, and help from Peter Falk and his wife, they funded the picture, delivering one of cinema’s most incredible and important portrayals of mental illness, strained marriage, and what it means to be a person riddled with a pain she can’t express. As a character too layered and confounding to marginalize as “hysterical” or “cracked up,” Rowlands later said, in the film I’m Almost Not Crazy, that “John has a great affinity for characters that are perceived by the world generally as crazy or cuckoo or wacko or at least eccentric… But we don’t see it that way…they have a different dream, a different thing that they want.”
But bringing those tremendous characters to life wasn’t a simple task. “Sometimes the tension on set was so great we could taste it,” Cassavetes said in Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes. For all his stubbornness and the borderline-abuse inflicted on his actors, he was never selfish in his filmmaking or precious with his own interpretation. He was an actor’s director through and through, obsessed with putting forth only genuine emotion. He believed in allowing the actors to insert their own personalities into their roles, giving them an artistic freedom to bring an intuitive understanding to the screen. “I really am more of an actor than a director,” he said. “I appreciate that there might be some secrets in people that might be more interesting than a ‘plot.’” And with his next haunting self-examination Opening Night, we again see a film completely absorbed in the personality of its cast — mainly that of Rowlands.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeW2PTnrGro]“As a matter of fact, because of the very personal nature of the way I work, directing my wife is probably easier than directing a woman I don’t know,” Cassavetes told Playboy. And with Opening Night, he dives further into the female psyche to tell the story of alcoholic Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon, who, while rehearsing for her latest play, is thrown into emotional and existential disarray after witnessing the death of a young fan. As one of his most immersive and shattering films, Cassavetes crafts a study of the artifice of cinema and celebrity in juxtaposition to the threat of aging and death, with Rowlands as a conduit to examine his own fears and anxieties as an artist. And for its many revelatory aspects, my favorite scene comes towards the end of the film when Cassavetes and Rowlands share the stage together. Their dynamic is aggressive and sharp and frightening in its force, yet giddily playful in its execution and filled with tenderness and an admiration for one another that can be felt in every interaction — a loosely choreographed dance of emotional devastation. In watching them one realizes that, for all of Rowlands’ brilliant onscreen counterparts — from Falk to Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel — she is at her most ferocious when opposite Cassavetes — and he at his most natural and explosive.
Although he would go on to make Big Trouble in 1986, Love Streams is universally heralded as Cassavetes’ final masterpiece. A film bathed in textures and colors that no longer exist, Love Streams had a surrealism and grandeur that the director hadn’t shared before. It also marked the last time he and Rowlands shared the screen together. But perhaps the best summation of their love, and the certain vein of love that Cassavetes expressed with his films, can be found in this answer he gave to Playboy when asked if he and Gena argue. “I believe that any two people who disagree should really go as far as they can, and I think we do: screaming, yelling, petty acts of hostility and cruelty — but it’s all meaningless,” he said. “It’s meaningless if that essential love is there. Like a rubber band that you stretch out, no matter how far you pull it — and even if it stings snapping back — it returns, the love reappears.”
Hillary Weston is the Senior Editor at BlackBook. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Photos: Everett Collection
