30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
The Potent Partnership of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
Moviemaking is inherently collaborative. Consider the films that the writer-director John Cassavetes and the actress Gena Rowlands made together from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Their work is so inextricably linked that one can forget each made pictures without the other. Their connection derives in large part from their real-life marriage, which lasted from 1954 until his death at age 59 in 1989, but also because Cassavetes wrote parts especially for his wife.
Rowlands died last August, at age 94, and now, from May 2 through 14, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Calif., is honoring their creative union by screening the six films he wrote and directed that starred her. But one needn't live in the Bay Area to see most of them, as the bulk are available on disc from the Criterion Collection, via various rent-or-purchase apps or streaming on the Criterion Channel.
