Gena Rowlands, an honorary Oscar winner best known for her groundbreaking film collaborations with her husband, actor and director John Cassavettes, and as a woman with Alzheimer’s disease who The notebookdied on Wednesday in her home in California, reports TMZ. She was 94 years old.

Rowlands’ son Nick Cassavettes, who directed The notebook– revealed in June 2024 that Rowlands, like her character in the film, suffered from Alzheimer’s. “She is completely demented,” he said Weekly entertainment“And it’s so crazy – we experienced it, she played it, and now it’s up to us.”

Rowlands “always wanted to be an actress,” she said in a 2015 interview for the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences web series Academy Originals“I realized that you don’t have to live just one life, you can be many people and do many things, and that sparked my curiosity.”

That sounds glamorous. But the star roles that John Cassavettes created for her were dark and emotional character studies of women on the fringes and margins of society: a prostitute without the heart of gold demanded in Hollywood in Facesa wife and mother who falls apart in A woman under the influence, and a gangster’s girlfriend who reluctantly protects a young boy from the mob in GloriaShe received Oscar nominations for her last two performances.

Rowlands was a character actor who could carry a film. She delivered an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performance in the 1987 made-for-television The Betty Ford Storyand won an Emmy for her role as a wife left destitute by her recently deceased husband’s gambling addiction in the 1991 television film Face of a stranger.

But even in supporting roles, she was always a welcome and uplifting presence. That’s what Cate Blanchett said when she introduced Rowlands at the 2015 Governor’s Award ceremony, where she received her honorary Oscar: “The intense authenticity and immediacy of her acting is, in my opinion, the closest anyone has ever brought to the presence of a live stage performance on film.”

Rowlands was an original. The playwright Tennessee Williams compared her to “a work of art that you stand in front of, as if it were paintings in a museum, or sunsets, or mountains, or lovers who slowly walk away from you.” She named Bette Davis as her role model, with whom she appeared in the television film Strangers: The story of a mother and her daughter. (“The pairing is almost too good to be true, but the reality is even better,” praised critic Sheila O’Malley). Rowlands said she responded to Davis’ independence in playing characters that did not conform to the norm or stereotype. “In those days,” she said Academy Originals“Women were expected to be sweet and obedient, and that just wasn’t what interested me. And Bette always played something that had a lot of bite.”

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father, Edwin Myrwyn Rowlands, served in the state assembly and senate before joining the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in the Department of Agriculture. Her mother, Mary Allan Neal, acted under the name Lady Rowlands and played Gena’s mother in three Cassavettes films.

Rowlands left the University of Wisconsin before graduating to move to New York to pursue her acting career. “I just couldn’t wait to be an actress,” she said. Interview Magazine in 2016. “I wanted to be one my whole life. So I went home and told my mom and she said, ‘Hmm, that sounds fascinating. It’s wonderful!’ And I told my dad and he literally said, ‘I don’t care if you want to be an elephant trainer as long as it makes you happy.’ That’s how strict I was raised.”

She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met Cassavettes. When he first saw her, he reportedly told a friend, “I’m going to marry her.”