Mother courage

Last month was not a good time to be making a film in Texas. First, there was a tornado. Then, the rain and thunderstorms came. Whole towns, it seems, were washed away. Gena Rowlands's descriptions of the elements running wild make the Lone Star state sound like Kansas City at the start of The Wizard of Oz. "On another movie that was nearby, they had to lock all the actors in a bank vault for their own safety. That didn't happen to us, thank God."

The film she is halfway through shooting is called (appropriately enough) Hope Floats. She co-stars with Sandra Bullock and Harry Connick Jnr. "We've been down here for about six weeks," she chuckles, "but it's beginning to seem like we may be stuck here for the rest of our lives." Rowlands is in her early sixties; a dangerous age, she admits: too old for the glamour parts, not quite old enough for the Jessica Tandy-like dotty grandma routine that wins Oscars. Nevertheless, she has avoided the purgatory of mindless supporting roles in TV movies and soaps. Her recent credits range from Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth to Terence Davies's Neon Bible.

She is, by reputation, a woman for a crisis. Few other actresses have her knack for acting close to the edge. As the fading Broadway star in Opening Night (1977) or as Peter Falk's mentally unstable wife in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), she reaches an awesome pitch of emotional intensity. Both films were shot outside the studio system by her writer- actor-director husband John Cassavetes, the crown prince of American independent cinema, who died in 1989.

With her blonde hair and classical features, Rowlands was always a slightly incongruous presence alongside Cassavetes's other regulars: crumpled character actors, like Seymour Cassell, Ben Gazarra and Peter Falk, who looked as if they lived on whisky and slept every night in their clothes. At the start of her career, in the late 1950s, she didn't look so very different from other Hollywood icons of the time such as Kim Novak or even Jayne Mansfield. But once she hooked up with Cassavetes, it didn't take long for the gloss to crack. Whatever the setting, whether Broadway or blue collar Midwest, she bristled with the raw intensity of a tragic heroine on leave from an Ibsen drama.

It is noticeable that she is in much quieter register in Unhook the Stars - her son Nick Cassavetes's directorial debut (reviewed opposite). She plays Mildred, an ageing but still handsome widow whose children have left home. "Mildred is a very conventional woman," Rowlands observes of the character. "She isn't a professional woman. She isn't unhappy or dissatisfied. It's just that she has reached a point where the children are grown and gone. That's a terrible wall. You have to do some fast tap-dancing to change your whole life."

Mildred is briefly seen "shooting the breeze" in a bar with big Tommy (Gerard Depardieu), a French-Canadian lorry driver she meets in somewhat improbable circumstances, but getting mildly drunk is as close as she comes to emotional upheaval. Even when she takes off without leaving a forwarding address for her self-centred businessman son and miserable teenage daughter, she does so in a discreet, unfussy fashion.

Rowlands insists that just because Mildred is undemonstrative, that doesn't mean it is an easy role. "Quiet parts are very challenging: you can only project the emotions and what is happening in a quiet way, from feeling it - the camera just has to pick it up."

The actress admits she is surprised that her 37-year-old son has turned into a film director. "I really couldn't have imagined it. When he was a little kid running around the movie sets that John and I were working on, he didn't seem to show any particular interest in what we were doing at all." Until trouble with his Achilles tendon put paid to the ambition, Cassavetes Jnr seemed destined to become a professional basketball player, not a film-maker.

So how does he compare to his dad behind the camera? It's an unfair but inevitable question. "There's much more similarity than I would have thought," Rowlands muses. "Even though John and Nick were extremely close, their personalities were very different and I would have expected their styles to be very, very different. But the big similarity is that they really love their actors. Everything goes to make you feel comfortable on set." Pressed on the subject, she suggests that Nick is "just a little more formal, a little stricter about the lines - he holds you to them a little harder."

In truth, Unhook the Stars isn't really like a John Cassavetes film. It is well-written, beautifully acted, but offers much less catharsis than such draining emotional odysseys as Husbands, Killing of a Chinese Bookie or Opening Night. Rowlands, who should know, acknowledges that "there's a great potential for disaster" in making movies with your immediate family. "But Nick and I get along awfully well and he handled everything with humour. As for me telling him what to do, the Cassavetes men don't take kindly to that. I tell you one thing - I would have choked him, held him by the throat, if he'd considered anyone else for the part of Mildred."

Rowlands is now warming to the idea of making films that her grandchildren can enjoy. (Somehow, one can't quite imagine them lining up to watch grandma have a nervous breakdown in one of grandpa Cassavetes's pics.) She is shortly to start work on a kids' movie for Spielberg's outfit, Dreamworks. She is also contemplating publishing some of her husband's old scripts so that people will finally accept what she has been telling them for years: namely that Cassavetes's films relied on improvisation to a far lesser degree than is commonly assumed.

Ironically, at the start of her career, Rowlands was not at all excited about cinema. "I just wanted to do stage work, but then John got interested in film. He intrigued us all into following him. He was kind of like the Pied Piper."

Cassavetes and Rowlands Inc were a genuinely independent small family business. They produced their own movies with their own money. Whenever the coffers ran dry, they'd stop work, get a job elsewhere and wait until they could afford to go on. Ask her to name the quality which made Cassavetes such a unique voice and she has no doubt. "John had a fearlessness. I lived with him for many years and I never once saw him depressed or frightened." And he didn't give a damn what the critics said or whether the films made a profit at the box-office. It's this sense of recklessness that Unhook the Stars ultimately lacks. But then, it succeeds in coaxing an entirely different style of performance from Rowlands.