Gena Rowlands Was a Legendary Actress, and She Had a Substantial Net Worth

Some people just know her from The Notebook (where she is excellent, by the way), but Gena Rowlands had decades and decades of great work before her death in August 2024. Few actresses were being bolder and more innovative in the 1970s, and few were earning the kind of acclaim she was.

Now, following the news of her death at 94, many want to learn more about Gena, and about the net worth that she accumulated over the course of her life. Here's what we know about her net worth.

At the time of her death, Gena's net worth was reportedly around $10 million. That net worth grew throughout her life as she amassed royalties from her various projects, and as whatever investments she may have had grew.

At her core, though, Gena was a working actress, and she made her living by starring in movies of all shapes and sizes throughout her career.

Gena Rowlands only became the actress from The Notebook toward the end of her career. Before then, she was a legendary actor of the stage and screen thanks to a variety of other, smaller movies.

She got her star in the 1950s when she was cast on Broadway in Middle of the Night, and she entered television just a few years later.

From 1963 to 1984, she made 10 movies with her husband, John Cassavetes, including Gloria and A Woman Under the Influence, which earned her her two Academy Award nominations. In 2021, Richard Brody, the film critic from The New Yorker, claimed that Gena was "the most important and original movie actor of the past half century-plus."

It may seem shocking to hear a pronouncement that strong if you only know Gena from her work on The Notebook, but even seeing a clip of some of her work in a movie like A Woman Under the Influence helps you understand just how far Gena was pushing the bounds of what screen acting could be during the course of her relationship with her husband.

John died in 1989, and Gena continued to work with less frequency after that before retiring from acting altogether in 2014. She died of Alzheimer's just three weeks after her son Nick, who directed her in The Notebook, revealed her diagnosis.

Now, many are learning about her remarkable legacy for the first time and coming to understand more fully why she makes you weep in The Notebook.