In the summer of 1983, on a Los Angeles set that was essentially his own home, John Cassavetes was told he had six months to live. He told no one—not his wife, who was starring in the film, and not the crew, who noticed only that his stomach had swollen tight beneath his shirt while the rest of him seemed to shrink. He was given half a year. He lived five and a half more years, drinking, gambling, and working until the end without ever revealing that every take was a countdown.
Born in New York City on December 9, 1929, six weeks after the stock market crash, Cassavetes spent part of his childhood in Greece after the Depression ruined his father’s fortunes. He returned to America at age seven unable to speak English, a formative experience in watching and listening to people that would define his later work. He drifted through several colleges before graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1950, motivated less by vocation than by the simple need for a job. His early years in the business were chaotic and, at times, alarming.
He chained himself to a radiator at CBS for a walk-on role, faked an appendicitis attack until paramedics arrived, and once returned to a casting director’s office with a gun after being told no one would believe him as a murderer. He also demolished a producer’s office before police arrived. Friends were split between those who thought him insane and those who adored his theatrical unpredictability. In late 1953, he saw Gena Rowlands, the daughter of a Wisconsin banker and state legislator, and announced she was the woman he would marry.
They wed in March 1954—four months after meeting—and remained married for 35 years until his death. Their relationship was famously combative. Both insisted they disagreed on nearly everything, and Cassavetes acknowledged a pattern of drinking, gambling, and womanizing, while Rowlands stayed with him for decades. Television gave him a career.
During the live drama boom of the 1950s, he was repeatedly cast as troubled delinquents, appearing in numerous teleplays. His film roles included a drifter opposite Sidney Poitier in Edge of the City in 1957, a performance that drew comparisons to Marlon Brando. At the same time, he started an acting workshop in New York, advertising in the newspaper and filling the room with amateurs, pickpockets, lawyers, bankers, and people off the street. In February 1957, appearing on a late-night radio show in New York, he announced he could make a better film than the one he was there to promote and asked listeners to contribute money.
The mail arrived with roughly $2,000 in the first days, most in bills of five dollars or less. Larger checks followed from show business figures, pushing the budget to about $40,000. The result was Shadows, shot on borrowed equipment on the streets of New York and in the apartment he shared with his wife, with music by Charles Mingus. The film’s famous closing title card announced that it was an improvisation.
Shortly before his death, Cassavetes confessed that this was not entirely true. The version the world knows had been shot a second time, and much of it was actually scripted with a professional screenwriter. The first version, roughly an hour long, was screened at the Paris Theater in 1958 to a largely hostile reception. Cassavetes himself called it “totally intellectual and therefore less than human” and made the film again.
The reworked Shadows won the Critics Award at Venice in 1960. But the critic Jonas Mekas, who had hailed the original version as a bold breakthrough, felt personally robbed by its replacement. The first print vanished for decades, eventually turning up in an attic in Florida, sold as unclaimed junk after being left on a New York subway train. When it resurfaced, Rowlands moved to block its screening, and the original version remains locked away.
Success in Europe led Cassavetes to declare in Film Culture that “Hollywood is not failing, it has failed. ” NBC gave him his own series, Johnny Staccato, in which he played a jazz pianist who solved crimes. He took the job for the money, which he needed desperately: during Shadows, the family had owed the milkman more than a thousand dollars, and Rowlands was seven months pregnant. He spent the last $300 set aside for the hospital on the film, promising to deliver the baby himself.
Paramount offered him a contract after the reviews for Shadows. His next film, Too Late Blues, flopped. He then worked on A Child Is Waiting, a drama set in an institution for intellectually disabled children. Cassavetes wanted the film to argue against institutionalization; producer Stanley Kramer wanted a love story.
They fought constantly, Kramer fired him, and the producer recut the film himself. At the studio screening, Cassavetes demanded his name be removed and reportedly shoved Kramer against a wall. Whether or not he actually punched him, Hollywood concluded he was unmanageable, and the town shut its doors. He survived by acting, taking roles for money.
Robert Aldrich cast him in The Dirty Dozen in 1967, in a performance that earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Every fee he earned went into Faces, a black-and-white film shot in his own living room over roughly six months, with actors doubling as camera operators and production stopping whenever the money ran out. A young Steven Spielberg worked as an unpaid runner. The first cut ran six hours; the final budget was around $275,000.
The film, a savage portrait of a middle-aged marriage, was nominated for three Academy Awards when it opened in 1968. He had also taken a role in Rosemary’s Baby, which he and Roman Polanski hated working on together. Cassavetes took the check and put it into Faces. He was unembarrassed about taking money from pictures simply to fund his own, calling filmmaking “an extremely expensive hobby.
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His next project, Husbands, followed three suburban men on a four-day bender after a friend’s funeral. The money came from an Italian count who put up $1. 5 million and surrendered all artistic control. The film was released in 1970 to hostile reviews, and Columbia cut 11 minutes from prints without permission.
The three leads also produced what Dick Cavett still calls the worst episode of his show, appearing apparently drunk, wrestling on the floor, ignoring questions, and smelling each other’s feet. Cassavetes told his friends they had just unsold most of the tickets to the movie. He continued directing through the 1970s. Minnie and Moskowitz, a screwball romance starring his wife, included a revealing incident: Cassavetes did not tell Rowlands he would be playing her violent married lover until before the scene, and hit her repeatedly on camera while the crew rushed to help.
The film was a commercial failure that is now studied in universities. The masterpiece of his career came from a play he wrote for Rowlands about what contemporary women were up against. He was told no one wanted to see “a crazy middle-aged dame. ” He mortgaged the house, borrowed from family, and took a large loan from Peter Falk, who had put up half a million dollars of his Columbo earnings.
A Woman Under the Influence premiered in 1974 to acclaim and zero distribution offers, so Cassavetes distributed it himself, telephoning theater owners and carrying reels himself, with help from a young Martin Scorsese. It grossed over $6 million on a $1 million budget. Rowlands won the Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar, and Cassavetes was nominated for Best Director. He remained one of a tiny handful of people ever nominated for acting, writing, and directing.
His subsequent films were regarded at the time as evidence he was losing his grip. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was pulled from theaters after seven days until he recut it. Opening Night, featuring what is considered Rowlands’ greatest performance, closed after nearly empty houses and was not picked up by an American distributor until 1991. Between them, he gave one of his finest performances in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, a film whose chaotic production history included May shooting over a million feet of film and hiding footage from the studio.
By 1980, his money was gone. He wrote scripts for hire and took a project for MGM after being asked for something suitable for child star Ricky Schroder. He described Gloria—eventually starring his wife and earning the best reviews of his life, tied for the Golden Lion at Venice—with contempt, calling it a “very fast-moving, thoughtless piece about gangsters. ” It was the film he believed in the least.
In the early 1980s, he spent his own money refurbishing a theater in Hollywood and mounted three one-act plays. In the spring of 1983, his mother died. That summer, he shot Love Streams for Cannon Films, playing a hollowed-out writer whose sister, played by Rowlands, refuses to leave his house. Two or three weeks into the shoot, he was told he had six months to live.
He said nothing, revised the script nightly, and refused to wear a looser shirt to hide his swollen stomach, deciding the belly belonged to the character. The film won the Golden Bear at Berlin in February 1984. One project followed, Big Trouble, a comedy he directed as a favor to Peter Falk but which Columbia recut. He called it “aptly titled,” said he was embarrassed to have his name on it, and worried it would be thought his final film.
His actual final work was almost unseen. In May 1987, at a tiny theater in West Hollywood with fewer than 70 seats, he wrote and directed A Woman of Mystery, starring his wife and Carol Kane. There is no known recording of the play, which one critic called his last fully achieved work. Woody Harrelson abandoned the production mid-run to fly to Rome for a film audition, a decision he later called one of the worst of his life.
His diagnosed condition was cirrhosis of the liver. He was advised to stop drinking and did not. He kept writing, leaving more than 40 unproduced screenplays and plays, as well as a 413-page novel version of Husbands. John Cassavetes died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on February 3, 1989, of complications of cirrhosis.
He was 59. Rowlands was at his side. He had been nominated for Academy Awards as a writer, actor, and director, and won nothing. He had made, on money scraped from parts he considered beneath him, a dozen films no studio would have allowed to exist.
His rehabilitation after death was complete and fast. Shadows, Faces, and A Woman Under the Influence are in the National Film Registry. Opening Night finally reached American screens in 1991 and is now routinely named among the greatest performances ever filmed. Those who knew him described a con man, a bully, a magnificent charmer, and a terrible husband who somehow stayed married for 35 years to a woman entirely his equal.
Rowlands’ own assessment was simpler: “John was one of a kind, the most totally fearless person I’ve ever known. ” He never made a film about an exploding helicopter, because, as he put it, he had never seen one. What he had seen was people destroying themselves in the smallest ways—and he admitted he had done all of it himself.