Gena Rowlands, the wife and muse of John Cassavetes whose remarkable was manifest in Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night and Gloria put her in the pantheon of acting legends, died Wednesday. She was 94.

Rowlands died surrounded by family members at her home in Indian Wells, California. She had battled Alzheimer’s since 2019.

Rowlands received Oscar nominations for her performances in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), where she played an isolated, emotionally vulnerable housewife who lapses into madness, and Gloria (1980), where she sparkled as a pissed-off child protector who rails against the Mob.

“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress?” Rowlands said at the ceremony. “You don’t just live one life — yours — you live many lives.”

Cassavetes directed her in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, in Shadows (1959), A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984). He wrote all but one of those dramas as well, and together, the couple kick-started the independent film movement in America.

Survivors include their son, writer-director Nick Cassavetes, for whom Rowlands starred as a lonely widow in Unhook the Stars (1996) and as elderly woman with dementia in The Notebook (2004).

She also appeared in her son’s She’s So Lovely (1997), based on a script by John Cassavetes.

Her daughters, Zoe Cassavetes and Xan Cassavetes, are writer-directors as well.

At her best when playing beleaguered heroines, Rowlands often downplayed her corn-fed Midwestern beauty, subverting her good looks when the part called for it — as in Opening Night, when she portrayed the aging and insecure stage actress Myrtle Gordon.

In 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Rowlands said there was no special treatment because she was married to the director– like when she asked Cassavetes a question as they filmed the first scene in Woman Under the Influence.

“I usually don’t ask questions,” she said. “I said, ‘I am sort of stuck.’ He said, ‘Gena, before you go any further, I wrote the picture with you in mind. You said you liked it.’ I said I loved it. He said, ‘You said you wanted to do it.’ I said, ‘I do.’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’ “

In Gloria, Rowlands displayed resilience as Gloria Swenson, a former girlfriend of mobster who goes on the run to protect the young boy (John Adames) who lives next door. It was an actioner, but she considered it a “gangster comedy.”

“She sets the initial premise and follows the script very completely,” Cassavetes said. “Very rarely will she improvise, though she does in her head and in her personal thoughts. Everybody else is going boom! boom! boom!, but Gena is very dedicated and pure.

“She doesn’t care if it’s cinematic, doesn’t care where the camera is, doesn’t care if she looks good — doesn’t care about anything except that you believe her. She caught the rhythm of that woman living a life she’d never seen. When she’s ready to kill, I’m amazed at how coldly she does it.”

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father was a banker and state senator, and her mother had been invited to be a Ziegfeld girl but pursued a career in art instead.

Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin but left to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in in New York. It was there that she met Cassavetes, an alum a year ahead of her who spotted Rowlands in student production of J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner.

Four months after they met, she and Cassavetes were married in 1954 and were together until he died from cirrhosis in February 1989, at age 59.

Rowlands‘ first professional appearance was in a Provincetown Playhouse drama.

She also did live TV and was cast by producer-director Joshua Logan in 1956 to play a young woman who falls in love with an older man (Edward G. Robinson) in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night.

After 18 months with the play, Rowlands signed with MGM and made her feature debut as Jose Ferrer’s confident wife in the drama The High Cost of Loving (1958).

She performed in the Dalton Trumbo Western Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas, in The Spiral Road (1962) opposite Rock Hudson and in Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra.

On television in the 1960s, Rowlands played the deaf-mute wife of a detective in the NBC series 87th Precinct and was the temptress Adrienne Van Leyden on ABC’s Peyton Place.

T0 support their own work, she and Cassavetes made other people’s movies–Machine Gun McCain (1969), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and Mazursky’s Tempest (1982), when they acted together —

“We wanted a certain way of life. We wanted to get up and really do what we wanted to do that day,” she once said. “We didn’t want to go do something that everyone said we should do. Believe me, everyone was saying we were doing the wrong thing, all of the time. But it was terribly satisfying.

“I think of the kids too. Every time they stepped out of their bedrooms, they were tripping over a cable or bumping into a camera. They were very easy with it. It wasn’t some kind of exotic thing where your parents went to the studio; they didn’t feel shut out of it.”

In Faces, Rowlands played a caring professional escort. And in Love Streams, she was wonderful in a screwball comedy.

Rowlands also won three Emmy Awards (from eight nominations), with one for playing the first lady in 1987’s The Betty Ford Story and another for portraying a waitress in a diner who is romanced by another Cassavetes regular, Ben Gazzara, in 2002’s Hysterical Blindness.

Rowlands played Michael J. Fox and Joan Jett’s mother in Schrader’s  Light of Day (1987); and appeared as philosophy professor in Woody Allen ‘s Another Woman (1988), two weak films.

She starred for Lasse Hallström in Once Around (1991) and Something to Talk About (1995) and for her daughter Zoe in Broken English (2007).

Her more recent film appearances came in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) — the first film she made after Cassavetes‘ death — Silent Cries (1993), Hope Floats (1998), The Weekend (1999), The Skeleton Key (2005) and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014).

Survivors also include her second husband, retired businessman Bob Forrest.

Director Sidney Lumet said of Rowlands: “The highest compliment I can pay to her is that the talent frightens me, making me aware of the lack of it in so many and the power that accrues to those who have it and use it well. And the talent educates and illuminates. She is admirable, which can be said of only a few of us.”