Gena Rowlands: A Life in Pictures Gena Rowlands: A Life in Pictures

The late actress might have followed in the path of so many other studio-system bombshells. But in one explosive performance after another, Ms. Rowlands proved she had more to offer.

You would never guess it from a film still. You could never imagine that, alone among her contemporaries, Gena Rowlands had the power to gaze into the lens of a camera and shatter every assumption about a woman’s psyche.

Though she came of age in an era of febrile bombshells, Hitchcock heroines with porcelain complexions and refrigerator cool, ditzes studiedly masking inner realities to conform to demeaning stereotypes, her career followed a different course.

Ms. Rowlands, whose death, at 94, was announced on Wednesday, began her career on 1950s television. She might easily have become just another midlevel product of the studio system had she not been cast in “Johnny Staccato,” an NBC series about a private detective played by her future husband, the actor and director John Cassavetes.

Although Ms. Rowlands’s diverse career encompassed nearly seven decades; garnered her three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Golden Globes and two Academy Award nominations (she was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2015); and included collaborations with directors as unalike as Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch and Mira Nair, it is her work with Mr. Cassavetes that inspired The New Yorker, in a 2021 ranking of great cinematic moments, to pronounce her “the most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus.”

What she embodied in the 10 films she made with her husband, most indelibly in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), was “the mystery that lies between human beings dwelling in emotional extremity, which is of course the only place that Cassavetes’s characters can dwell,” as the writer and director Katherine Dieckmann, who teaches in Columbia University’s film program, once wrote. Ms. Rowlands once told The Associated Press that her husband “had a particular sympathetic interest in women and their problems in society, how they were treated and how they solved and overcame what they needed to.”

He also had a fearless — some might say ruthless — ability to mine Ms. Rowlands’s vulnerability onscreen to capture performances possibly without equivalent in cinematic history. “She’s a very beautiful woman in every instance,” Ms. Dieckmann said in an interview. “Yet she was so willing to be messy, to completely break that face open for a performance.” If, as she added, we tend to make assumptions about “blondes who look like that,” what Ms. Rowlands achieved as an actor was validation of the truth that surfaces are seldom to be trusted. “Beauty like that can, I imagine, feel like a prison house.”