‘I was always a BROAD! I can’t stand the sight of MILK!” This is Gena Rowlands at her awe-inspiring toughest in John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama-thriller Gloria from 1980. She is sexy, smart, a match for any man. Rowlands was a strong, passionate heroine in the tradition of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis and Lauren Bacall. In fact, her director-husband John Cassavetes was in some ways Bogart to her Bacall. Rowlands staked a claim to the male prerogative of being sensual, dangerous and damaged; a natural survivor. In Gloria, and also in Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), in which she plays a severe philosophy professor, Rowlands wears a belted trenchcoat, the kind that Bogart would wear.
In recent years, Rowlands was known most widely as the sweet old lady in the tearjerking drama The Notebook (2004), being read to in a retirement home by the ageing and gallant James Garner. She was tenderly directed in this film by her son, Nick Cassavetes. For all its mawkishness, the film acquired a real fanbase, but it gives only the most oblique indication of what Rowlands was like in her magnificent, leonine prime.
