American actress Gena Rowlands was nominated for two Oscars and gave memorable, touching and often disturbing performances. Here are five of her best performances:
In this low-budget, critically acclaimed Western, Rowlands is a loyal friend who falls in love with a noble cowboy who is up against the modern world, played by Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas.
Rowlands only appears in a few scenes, but her performance makes an immediate impact.
“I had never seen anyone so beautiful and so serious,” actress Mia Farrow told Elle magazine in 2015. “It was especially unique at a time when so many women were trying to be girlish.”
Farrow said, “Jenna did nothing like that. There was a directness to it, not that she wasn’t fun or flamboyant, but it came from a place that was real and deep.”
Nominated for three Oscars, the independent American filmmaker John Cassavetes, this domestic drama directed by Rowlands’ husband tells the story of a night of drinking among four people, in which painful tensions emerge about a disintegrating marriage.
Rowlands displays a wide range of expressions and emotions in the film, which is shot mostly in close-up and appears to have no script but is in fact carefully written.
In possibly her best role, Rowlands gives a most subtle and touching performance as Mabel, a loving and sensitive housewife and mother who slowly descends into heartbreaking madness.
He was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe Award, and the film remains a classic with devastating emotional power.
“This performance remains as shocking today as it was in 1974,” stated an article published in 2015 on the website of noted American critic Roger Ebert.
“It’s a performance that raises the bar for everyone. It shows the huge difference between skill and talent.”
As an aging actress attempting to put together a play with an equally troubled co-star, Rowlands offers a lesson in how to play an alcoholic with honesty, tragedy and even some humor.
In 1991 The New York Times wrote that she was “at her most radiant” in the film, in which she was again directed by Cassavetes, to whom she remained married for more than 30 years.
The paper stated, “Miss Rowlands, as she has shown in other films directed by her husband, can be incomparably funny even when inconsistent.”
Playing the high-heeled wife of a gangster who must take on the guardianship of a young orphan named Phil, Rowlands earned a second Oscar nomination for her role in one of Cassavetes’ final films before his death.
The British Film Institute praised “another superb performance” on their website, noting Rowlands’ uniquely intense and passionate presence on screen.
The New York Times reported upon its release that “she has enormous talent, and in ‘Gloria’ she embodies it with gusto, whether she’s shooting a robber at close range or driving Phil to the cemetery . . . to say farewell to his parents.”
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