4/15/2023 0 Comments Miranda popkey twitter![]() On set, his “half-crazy” side sometimes manifested as frat boy humor. She was cool, poised, charming he was half-crazy, hot-blooded and Mediterranean.” Rowlands was socially smooth and refined Cassavetes rough-hewn, impulsive, passionate and driven. He was the fast-talking street-smart city boy. “She was artistic and from a ‘musical background’. “She had grown up in the country and was from a financially comfortable setting,” he writes. If you think a marriage isn’t going to be like that, you’ve got trouble.”Ĭassavetes and Rowlands in 1975 (Photo: YouTube).Ĭarney attributes these disagreements in part to differences in upbringing and temperament. “John and I probably disagree on just about everything in the world,” Rowlands told People in 1984. “She thinks so totally opposite to anything I could ever conceive.” On this point at least, they were in agreement. “We agree in taste on absolutely nothing,” he insists. In Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the actor, writer, and director emphasizes to Carney how dissimilar he and his wife were. They were together for the next thirty-five years. Cassavetes was twenty-four, Rowlands twenty-three. “The one thing I knew,” Rowlands told The Hollywood Reporter last year, “was I didn’t want to fall in love, I didn’t want to get married and I didn’t want to have children.” Four months later, in March of 1954, they were wed at the Little Church Around the Corner in downtown Manhattan. Cassavetes tells a story of love at first sight - “I turned to a friend and said: “ That’s the girl I’m going to marry” - but Rowlands wasn’t so sure. They were both driven, aspiring actors who hadn’t yet met with much success. Cassavetes, the son of a Greek immigrant, was small (five foot seven - he would lie about his height throughout his career) and energetic to the point of mania Rowlands, the daughter of a Wisconsin state senator, was blonde with elegant manners. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands starting dating in December 1953. It’s a pint-size portrait of their relationship, which was apparently loving, artistically fruitful, but also undeniably tumultuous: a decades-long battle neither ever tired of. ![]() The anecdote - Cassavetes’s ruthlessness and his fondness for extremes (why did the crew think he’d actually hit her, anyway?) Rowlands’s cool seizing of an opportunity for revenge - is telling. When he hit her, as the camera rolled, “the crew sprang to Rowlands’s aid, imagining she really had been attacked by Cassavetes, and Rowlands, to retaliate for Cassavetes’s refusal to tell her in advance that he was playing the part, pretended she had really been hurt.” I like to know who I’m working with.” As Ray Carney tells the story in his Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Rowlands was “floored” when her husband told her “just before the scene was about to be filmed” that he’d be playing opposite her. “As time went on,” Rowlands reported, “I became more and more upset. Case in point: he hadn’t told his wife in advance that he’d be playing the part of her paramour, Jim. “I don’t want you lying to me about being drunk, I don’t want you lying to me about ‘ Darling,’ understand me?” he growls.Ĭassavetes could be manipulative - even cruel - as a director, in order to elicit truthful performances. And then he hits her: once, twice, five times. He takes a slug of beer and ambles into the living room. “Okay darling, I’ll see you tomorrow.” The camera cuts and through a doorway the viewer sees a man putting a suit jacket on. She spends a few tipsy moments outside her apartment trying to figure out how much to pay her cab driver she sings “When I Fall in Love” to herself as she stumbles inside she chats with Florence over the phone for a moment. Half an hour into director John Cassavetes’s sixth film, 1971’s Minnie and Moskowitz, Minnie, played by Cassavetes’s wife and frequent collaborator, Gena Rowlands, comes home after an evening with her friend Florence.
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