“I was always very lucky,” Gena Rowlands insists. “But I didn’t necessarily deserve it.” It’s an idea that the 86-year-old actress, currently in New York to present a series of films she made with her first husband John Cassavetes, returns to again and again. When asked about her career, which includes major successes on stage and on screen in films like “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Opening Night,” her responses take the form of screwball anecdotes imbued with an aw-shucks innocence suggestive of her Midwestern roots: Things just happened. She was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.  But to be in the right place at the right time takes an intrepid spirit — you have to be ready to follow life in unexpected directions. “Confidence was never my weak suit,” she finally admits. “I always wanted to be an actress; I read so much when I was little, and it revealed to me there were other things to be. You can live a lot of lives and have a lot of fun and see a lot of things.”  In 1950, when Rowlands arrived in New York to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she was overjoyed to make it out of her small Minnesota town. “I was so excited I could barely speak,” she says. The Academy’s campus during that period was located at Carnegie Hall, and she remembers sneaking away from her classes to marvel at the opera singers practicing in the auditoriums. It was in the locker room at the school, where students would keep their playbills and notebooks between classes, that Rowlands first saw Cassavetes, a striking former student a year ahead of her. Rowlands admits he was “really good looking” almost offhandedly — as if it’s so obvious it doesn’t even need to be explained. But she didn’t have romance on her mind. “The one thing I never wanted to do was to fall in love or get married or have children,” she says. “I wanted to act.”  Rowlands departed the Academy in 1951, before graduating, because she couldn’t afford the tuition. But as luck would have it, not long before she would leave the school, Cassavetes introduced himself to her after a student performance of “Dangerous Corner.” She recognized him, but it wasn’t an instant connection. She said it took three years before he was able to fully convince her to be with him — she was determined not to let anything shift her focus away from acting — but the two were eventually married in 1954, and made 10 films together before his death in 1989. When it comes to how, exactly, he wooed her, she smiles and keeps mum. “Life,” she says, “has its little surprises.”  An earlier version of this article misstated Gena Rowlands’s age. She is 86, not 85.  “Cassavetes/Rowlands” runs through July 24 at the Metrograph, 13 Ludlow Street, New York, metrograph.com.
The actress recounts her early days at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts with the director with whom she’d eventually make 10 films — and a life.