John Cassavetes Took Hollywood’s Money to Make the Films It Wouldn’t

John Cassavetes

Photo: NBC Television / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 9, 1929 New York City, United States
Died	February 3, 1989 (59)
Occupation	Filmmaker and actor
Known for	A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Awards	Golden Bear · FIPRESCI Prize, Berlin International Film Festival · Critics Award, Venice Film Festival

For most of his working life John Cassavetes had two employers. One was Hollywood, which paid him to be menacing: the actor husband who trades his wife to a coven in Rosemary’s Baby, the condemned prisoner in The Dirty Dozen, the orchestra conductor who murders his mistress in an episode of Columbo. The other was himself, a director with no studio and no distributor, who shot his films in his own living room with his wife, his friends and his mother in the cast. The second employer was always paid by the first.

What he bought with that money did not look like anything else in American film. Long scenes in which people drink, sing, insult each other and refuse to explain themselves. A camera that seems to arrive late to the room. Actors, Gena Rowlands above all, allowed to be ridiculous and frightening inside the same shot. Critics called it improvisation. Cassavetes called it a script, and the script was usually his.

He was born John Nicholas Cassavetes in New York City on December 9, 1929, the son of Nicholas John Cassavetes, a Greek immigrant, and Katherine Demetriou, who would later turn up in his films. He spent his first years in Greece and came back to New York at seven speaking no English. He drifted through Blair Academy and was expelled from Champlain College in Vermont before enrolling at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, partly because friends told him the place was full of girls. He graduated in 1950. Three years later a young actress named Gena Rowlands auditioned there; they were married within four months.

By 1956 he was running an acting workshop in Manhattan with his friend Burt Lane, built against the Method that Lee Strasberg taught at the Actors Studio. The two of them auditioned for Strasberg with a scene they claimed came from a recent play and in fact made up on the spot; Strasberg was impressed and offered Cassavetes a scholarship, which he turned down on the grounds that a teacher so easily fooled had nothing to teach him. An exercise from that workshop became Shadows, paid for with money from friends, family and listeners of Jean Shepherd’s late-night radio show. Cassavetes hated the first version, shown in 1958, reshot much of it and premiered the new cut in 1959 with a score built from Charles Mingus and Shafi Hadi. No American distributor would touch it. It won the critics’ prize at the Venice Film Festival instead.

Television kept the house running. He played the title role in Johnny Staccato, a jazz pianist working as a private eye, on NBC in 1959 and 1960, and directed five episodes. After two pictures inside the studio system in the early 1960s he went back to paying for his own, and the acting work became the financing plan. The Dirty Dozen in 1967 brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor; Roman Polanski cast him as Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby a year later.

Faces, released in 1968, took about three years, was shot largely in the Cassavetes home and earned three Oscar nominations, including one for his original screenplay. To get it seen he set up his own distribution company. Husbands followed in 1970, with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara as three middle-aged men on a bender after a friend’s funeral, a film he called personal: his elder brother had died at thirty. Falk and Gazzara, along with Seymour Cassel, became the stock company that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

The 1970s belonged to Rowlands. In A Woman Under the Influence (1974) she plays a housewife coming apart in front of her family, and the film brought Oscar nominations for her and for Cassavetes as director. In Opening Night (1977) she is an ageing star losing her grip during the out-of-town tryouts of a play, a role that won her the Silver Bear for best actress in Berlin. Gloria (1980), his most conventional crime picture, earned her another Oscar nomination. Between them came The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), with Gazzara as a strip-club owner who gambles himself into a contract killing; it failed so badly that Cassavetes recut it into a shorter version two years later.

The improvisation legend is the part of his reputation that holds up worst. Apart from the first version of Shadows, his films were tightly written; what he gave actors was the freedom to interpret, and he rewrote scenes after rehearsals rather than inventing them on set. “I believe in improvising on the basis of the written word,” he said. The other charge is harder to settle. The band Le Tigre built a whole song, “What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?”, around the question of whether films that keep putting women through humiliation and breakdown can still be held up as liberating. His defenders point to Rowlands, who shaped those characters as much as he did. The question has not gone away, and it should not.

Love Streams, made with money from Cannon Films, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1984 and is often treated as his real last film: he plays a womanising writer opposite Rowlands as his sister. Two years later he took over Big Trouble from Andrew Bergman, watched the studio overrule him and disowned the result. A long-time drinker, he was already ill when he staged his play Woman of Mystery in Los Angeles in 1987. He died of complications of cirrhosis on February 3, 1989, aged 59, leaving more than forty unproduced screenplays. One of them, She’s Delovely, a project he had discussed with Sean Penn, was finally filmed by his son Nick as She’s So Lovely in 1997, with Penn in the lead.

The afterlife has been steadier than the life. Shadows, Faces and A Woman Under the Influence sit in the National Film Registry, the Independent Spirit Awards hand out a John Cassavetes Award every year to a film made for under a million dollars, and his three children all work in film. Rowlands died in August 2024, aged 94. In February 2026 the Criterion Collection gave A Woman Under the Influence its own Blu-ray edition for the first time, outside the box set where it had lived for two decades. Every low-budget director who shoots in an apartment with friends and calls it freedom is working from his model, usually without his bill: the villain’s fees that paid for it.

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Tags: actors, Rosemary's Baby, John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence, Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands

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