Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born June 19, 1930 in Madison, WI. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, served in the state Assembly and Senate before joining Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the Department of Agriculture. Her mother, Mary Allan Neal, acted under the name Lady Rowlands, portraying Gena’s onscreen mother in three Cassavettes films.
Rowlands left the University of Wisconsin before graduating so she could move to New York to pursue her acting career. “I just couldn’t wait anymore to go be an actress,” she told Interview Magazine in 2016. “I’d wanted to be one all my life. So I went home and I told my mom and she said, ‘Huh, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!’ And I told my father and he literally said, ‘I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer if it makes you happy.’ That is how strictly I was brought up.”
She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met Cassavettes. Upon seeing her for the first time, he reportedly told a friend, “I’m going to marry her.”
Rowlands made her television debut in 1954 and worked prolifically for more than six decades. She made her Broadway debut opposite Edward G. Robinson in 1956 in Middle of the Night and her screen debut opposite Jose Ferrer in 1958 in The High Cost of Living. That same year, she had an uncredited appearance in Cassavettes’ directorial debut, Shadows, an interracial love story that, unlike his later films, was improvised.
Cassavettes is widely considered to be the father of the American independent film movement. Inspired by Italian neo-realism films, his own movies were intensely personal works made outside of, and uncompromised by, the Hollywood system. Rowlands was his muse. “He had a particular interest in women,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “He was interested in women’s problems and where they are in society and what they have to overcome. He offered me some really wonderful parts.”
These included Minnie in the offbeat love story Minnie and Moskowitz, middle-aged actress Myrtle Gordon in Opening Night, and divorcee Sarah Lawson in Love Streams, Cassavettes’ last film before he died in 1989. Their films were self-financed. “We paid for our own pictures by acting for others or mortgaging our home,” Rowlands said.
Some others for whom she acted included American auteurs Woody Allen (Another Woman), Paul Mazursky (The Tempest), Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth), and her son, Nick (The Notebook, her biggest box office hit and her most popularly-known film).
Other notable films include the western Lonely Are the Brave opposite Kirk Douglas, the groundbreaking 1985 TV film An Early Frost—the first to deal with AIDS, in which she portrayed the compassionate mother of a closeted son—and Something to Talk About, a Julia Roberts vehicle in which Rowlands and Robert Duvall co-starred as her parents.
When asked in a 2015 Variety interview whether she thought she would be working so long, Rowlands replied by joking, “Working this long? I didn’t even think I’d be living this long.”
She was officially retired at the time of her death, but her performances endure as inspiration for other actors. Laura Linney, who costarred with Rowlands in the 2001 TV film, Wild Iris, paid tribute to her at the 2015 Governor’s Awards ceremony, praising her “ferocity and grace,” her “ravishing beauty” and her status as “a true legend” whose work ethic made a statement: “Here is the example. Here is the standard. Here is the quality of work we should all strive for.”