Gena Rowlands: five key films

HOLLYWOOD, CA – FEBRUARY 28: Actress Gena Rowlands attends the 88th Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood & Highland Center on February 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California. Ethan Miller/Getty Images/AFP (Photo by Ethan Miller / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP)

US actress Gena Rowlands was nominated for two Oscars and delivered memorable, heartfelt and often troubling performances. Here are five of her best:

‘Lonely Are the Brave’ (1962)

In this low-budget, critically acclaimed Western, Rowlands is a loyal friend in love with a noble cowboy who is resisting the modern world, played by Hollywood titan Kirk Douglas.

Rowlands only appears in a few scenes, but her performance had an immediate impact.

“I’d never seen anyone that beautiful with a certain gravitas. It was particularly unique in that time, when many women were trying to be girlish,” said actress Mia Farrow in 2015, quoted in Elle magazine.

“Gena did none of that. There was a directness — not that she wasn’t fun and didn’t smolder — but it came from a place that was both genuine and deep,” Farrow said.

‘Faces’ (1968)

Nominated for three Oscars, this domestic drama directed by independent US filmmaker John Cassavetes — Rowlands’s husband — follows four people over a night of drinking in which painful tensions about an unravelling marriage emerge.

Rowlands reveals a great range of expression and emotion in the film, which is shot mostly close-up and appears unscripted but was in fact carefully written.

‘A Woman Under the Influence’ (1974)

In arguably her greatest role, Rowlands is at her most subtle and moving as the loving and vulnerable housewife and mother, Mabel, who slowly descends into heartbreaking madness.

She was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe, the film remaining a classic of devastating emotional force.

“The performance is as startling today as it was in 1974,” says a 2015 article on the website of acclaimed US critic Roger Ebert.

“It is the kind of performance that raises the bar for everyone else. It shows the enormous gap between skill and genius.”

‘Opening Night’ (1977)

As an aging actress trying to mount a play with an equally troubled co-star, Rowlands offers a lesson in how to handle the role of an alcoholic with integrity, tragedy and even some humor.

She was “at her most radiant”, wrote The New York Times in 1991 about the film in which she is again directed by Cassavetes, to whom she was married for more than 30 years.

“Miss Rowlands, as she has shown in other films directed by her husband, can be incomparably funny while coming apart at the seams,” the paper said.

‘Gloria’ (1980)

Having fun as a gangster’s high-heeled wife saddled with the guardianship of a young orphan called Phil, Rowlands won a second Oscar nomination for her role in one of Cassavetes’ last films before his death.

The British Film Institute on its website celebrated “another eye-popping performance,” referring to Rowlands’s typically intense and passionate presence on screen.

She “has a lot of talent and realises it with gusto in ‘Gloria’, whether she is gunning down a hood at point-blank range or taking Phil to a cemetery… to say farewell to his parents,” The New York Times reported on its release.