A peerless actress was Gena Rowlands. She was also the muse of actor and rightly renowned avant-garde filmmaker John Cassavetes (†1989), to whom she was married from 1954. It was an inspiration that was mutual. A number of great Cassavetes films are unthinkable without Rowlands. They married and had three children. Children who would also become filmmakers themselves. She started acting young and continued to act into old age, consequently having a career that spanned some seventy years from her first roles in films such as Shadows to later films such as 2004's The Notebook directed by her son Nick Cassavetes in which she plays a woman with dementia, the condition that would also affect her in old age. You could say she...

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