Gena Rowlands, who has died aged 94, was in the tradition of formidable performers such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford yet, unlike them, she always remained an actor rather than a star. She was, said the critic Kent Jones, “finally a little too weird for superstardom”.
She did her most fearless work as part of an informal repertory company (also including Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel) in a string of dense, demanding and highly charged films by her husband, the devoutly independent director John Cassavetes, who favoured rawness and improvisation but scorned compromise. The most comparatively gentle of their collaborations was Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), in which she and Cassel gave what the critic Roger Ebert called “performances so beautiful you can hardly believe it” as mismatched lovers.
