Just mention the name Gena Rowlands and the faces of actresses and, perhaps, all women suddenly light up. It's more than just an immense admiration for her work: It's a deep, intimate understanding of what this woman achieved, and how she represented all of us. Rowlands, who died on Wednesday, August 14 at her home in Indian Wells, California, from Alzheimer's disease at the age of 94, was something more than an artist who revolutionized her art. She seemed to have run the gamut of female experience, with a taste for failure rather than victory. Her greatest roles tell the story of a woman exhausted, misunderstood, mad, anxious about growing old, loving, but loving desperately, and lonely to the point of tears. For an actress, this is perhaps the only territory to explore, the only show to perform: that of women's fatigue.

Her name is inseparable from another, that of director and actor John Cassavetes (1929-1989). They were a legendary couple if ever there was one, but the formula does a poor job of hiding everything they brought to their art, independence to the point of shedding their own skins, friendship and love as creative fuels. So many filmmakers have wanted to be Cassavetes, so many actresses have wanted to be Rowlands. But their genius was rooted in a way of filmmaking so risky, exhausting and unique that it is, in essence, impossible to reproduce.

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, into a well-off family in Cambria, Wisconsin, to a father who was a local politician and a mother who was a housewife and involved her daughter in her artistic activities, painting, music and theater. Up until the age of 12, she suffered from a series of health problems, missed school and vented her imagination outside the confines of her bedroom. Back on her feet, she joined a highly ambitious theater troupe between the ages of 14 and 17. Too young to try her luck in New York, she tried in vain to distance herself from the theatrical world: "I wanted to get back into the real world, to go back to school. But it was too late, the theater wouldn't let me go," she said in an interview with Stig Björkman in French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma in 2001.

Rowlands and Cassavetes met at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) in New York. She joined AADA just as he graduated. They crossed paths several times in the corridors. After each play, Cassavetes slipped backstage to congratulate the young woman. They fell in love and made their relationship official in 1953, but not without anguish for the actress: "I had no intention of giving up my career and becoming a housewife. I was almost upset to run into John, because I'd never seen such a handsome man, and I thought, 'I'm screwed.'"

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