Gena Rowlands

Born: June 19 1930
Where: Cambria, Wisconsin, USA

The twice Oscar-nominated actress is best known for two films directed by her husband John Cassavettes - the thriller Gloria and A Woman Under the Influence.

The daughter of a state senator and a painter, Rowlands was born and raised in Wisconsin.

After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, she moved to NYC to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she met actor and filmmaker John Cassavetes.

She was brought to Hollywood to portray Jose Ferrer's wife in The High Cost of Loving and went on to bring warmth to her role in Lonely Are the Brave.

Rowlands followed with her first collaboration with Cassavetes as director, A Child Is Waiting, in which she was the emotionally distraught mother of a mentally challenged child.

After a five-year hiatus from the big screen during which she concentrated on raising her family, she returned to films as the wife of a millionaire who hires Frank Sinatra's Tony Rome to find their missing daughter.

But it was to be her association with her spouse that would bring her considerable attention and acclaim.

Cassavetes' Faces, in which she was a prostitute, is now considered a classic of independent filmmaking.

In Minnie and Moskowitz, she was the lonely middle-class gentile romanced by a Jewish hippie (Seymour Cassel).

Perhaps their finest film collaboration was A Woman Under the Influence in 1974, in which Rowlands portrayed a mentally unbalanced housewife whose husband (Peter Falk) eventually has her committed.

Opening Night also offered her another chance to deliver a bravura turn, this time as a famous actress on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Rowlands played a tough gun-moll who reluctantly becomes the protector of a child in Gloria, which earned her a second Best Actress Oscar nod.

Her final film collaboration with Cassavetes was Love Streams, in which she again played an erratic woman coping with a divorce.

With her patrician blonde beauty and strong, yet not domineering, screen presence, she has enlivened films as diverse as Paul Schrader's Light of Day as Michael J Fox's dying mother.

In Woody Allen's Another Woman she was a middle-aged woman facing a series of crises, and in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth she played cab driver Winona Ryder's passenger.

Rowlands also earned critical kudos as Julia Roberts' genteel mother in Lasse Hallstrom's Something to Talk About.

She also starred in son Nick Cassavetes' Unhook the Stars as a woman beginning a new life after her husband's death and made a cameo appearance in his She's So Lovely. v The actress has gradually assumed more mature roles ranging from Sandra Bullock's no-nonsense mother in Hope Floats to Sean Connery's betrayed spouse in Playing by Heart.

Reteaming with her son Nick, Rowlands played the Alzheimer's-ravaged present-day version of the lead character Allie in The Notebook.