“Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” In 1981’s Love Streams, Gena Rowlands (pronounced “Jenna”) delivers these lines with her trademark intensity, her trademark blonde hair wildly framing her face, her trademark hand acting punctuating each sentence. The intimate familial drama marks the last collaboration between her and her actor-writer-director husband John Cassavetes, before his untimely passing in 1989 at 59 years old. The power couple shot the film in their own home, and it plays like a swan song that emphasizes the raw complexity of their work together: tender and tempestuous, romantic and cynical, repressed and expressed. The perfect storm. Lightning in a bottle.

Gena Rowlands passed away on August 14, 2024, at the age of 94. She was an iconoclast, rightfully frustrated with the all-too-often watery roles offered to women, an idea expanded upon in Opening Night. In response, Cassavetes would write complex scripts tailored to his wife’s behemoth talent, producing them independently and to little fanfare. Yes, Rowlands was Oscar-nominated for A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, but she didn’t receive the statue until Laura Linney and Cate Blanchett lauded her with an Honorary Academy Award in 2015. Simply put, she was your favorite actress’s favorite actress.

On Letterboxd, thousands of members are feeling the loss: in the days after her passing, Official Top 250-staple A Woman Under the Influence amassed ten times the usual number of watchlist adds and eighteen times the usual number of logs. The majority of these watches included five-star ratings, with tommybo123 writing that Rowlands gives “one of the most vulnerable, devastating, impassioned performances committed to celluloid, that still holds up today both in memory and influence.”

In the aforementioned Opening Night, Rowlands as Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon says, “If I can reach a woman sitting in the audience who thinks that nobody understands anything and my character goes through everything that she’s going through, I feel like I’ve done a good job.” Judging from the Letterboxd reviews of her films that we’ve gathered below, she’s done a great job. Rest easy, Gena. Our love for you is a stream.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes

“Gena Rowlands’s performance here is lyrical. Every peculiar micro expression, every movement, every flicker of vulnerability—her facial features perpetually arranged as though she could begin sobbing at any moment. Mabel’s life is lived in bursts—whirlwinds of pain and confusion at her husband’s neglect and contradictions, an abundance of emotion that just has nowhere to go but to come up to the surface—and every molecule of it manifests in Rowlands’s face. If she is anywhere to be seen in the frame, you can’t help but fix your eyes on her. When she’s not on screen, you’re wishing she was. The hard pill to swallow is that Mabel is hardly any more insane than Nick. God forbid a woman be filled with untameable whimsy! At no point does this feel like watching a movie. This is complete immersion in something real.” —Marisa

Love Streams (1984)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes

“[Cassavetes] said goodbye in the final frame by waving at us. Gena maybe never encapsulated her legacy so neatly. Like the film, she strode in like a hurricane, told us that love was all that mattered and eventually left us to come to our own conclusions. She never pandered, never softened, never let us forget the weight of the women that lumbered on screen. She was cigarette smoke and softening eyes. She held the hand of every actress that came behind her. She was everything and she said goodbye and she knew that her films wouldn't just disappear into the rain. Thank you, Gena. You and John are finally reunited in the continuous stream.” —kailey

Faces (1968)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes

“Cassavetes films nail such a specific feeling down for late nights where the drinks go on too long and emotions range all over the spectrum. Everyone in his films is hurt, lost, frankly out of their fucking minds and most importantly real. I just don’t think there will be anyone who can attain the feeling of his films again. Rest in peace Gena. The undoubtedly greatest actress to ever grace the screen. So much raw emotion in all of her roles with zero overacting. Sells it everytime.” —jacobdacosta

Gloria (1980)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes

“The way Gena Rowlands smirked, the way she smoked, the curls of her hair. It’s actually very fashionable to outrun the mobs in heels and have a crisis head-to-toe in designer Ungaro (one of my favs! And truly, you are seeing ’80s silk and silhouette on display here!! I love the pink top and jacket but that polka dot dress at the end with the yellow collar is my absolute fave). It’s even more chic to kill them all the same as you dodge your way around New York, letting the hustle and bustle of the city shield you, as you take on responsibility for a kid that you profess to not even like, yet find yourself protecting at the same time. Gloria is Rowlands’s film through and through—the camera lingers on every minute expression, finding beauty as her face disappears behind clouds of smoke or as the sun casts its light on her hair in the back of a cab… Pouring one out for orange cats everywhere. (This watch is for you, queen Gena Rowlands)” —tramy

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes

“The performance that Gena Rowlands delivers here is shocking, so natural and grounded… There’s a moment when she walks towards the camera and out of frame with some haste and I have to wonder if that was the performance boiling over into palpable overwhelming feelings. It’s maybe not the kind of physicality that comes to mind when someone mentions that style of acting, but it replays in my mind over and over. It sticks with you. I don’t know how many other people in that role could have given Minnie Moore that much more life. Gena Rowlands gave us so much. I really loved her. I loved her like I knew her. I’m forever grateful for her contributions to this thing of ours. I truly believe she was the greatest, bar none.” —austin

Night on Earth (1991)

Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

“Only watched the first vignette with Gena Rowlands and Winona Ryder last night upon hearing of Gena’s death. This was near perfect so would rate this short story alone a 5 ⭐️ Three genius performances—Gena as high-femme high-intuition casting agent doing some impeccable telephone acting, Winona as self-aware chain-smoking foul-mouthed sweet grunge taxi driver and of course LA playing itself at sunset. You could feeeel the heat on the street from the cab ride from LAX to Beverly Hills.” —Izzy Bella

The Notebook (2004)

Directed by Nick Cassavetes, written by Jeremy Leven and Jan Sardi from a novel by Nicholas Sparks

“Watching this film on the day Gena Rowlands died of Alzheimer’s was perhaps not the brightest thing I ever did; I cried all through the closing credits. But the juxtaposition of her masterful internalized performance of Allie with her younger self—stunningly performed with such life and vitality by Rachel McAdams—is the core of this film and its great strength, overcoming the manipulative sentimentality of the story, and making it an emotional watch that really stays with you.” —Cinematographe9