Every great film performance expands the medium in its own way, giving audiences something to respond to while also offering fresh ideas for aspiring actors. A select few can be said to have completely redefined the craft: Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane," Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront," Toshiro Mifune in "Rashomon," and Gena Rowlands in "A Woman Under the Influence."

Rowlands died Wednesday at age 94, a half-century after “A Woman Under the Influence” premiered at the 1974 New York Film Festival. Rowlands was the last to leave a tight-knit cabal of titans — actors who transformed modern cinema: Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Ben Gazzara and, of course, Rowlands’ late husband, actor-director John Cassavetes.

Younger viewers who know Rowlands only as the memory-impaired elderly woman in “The Notebook” (directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes) or for her Emmy-winning turn in “Hysterical Blindness” owe it to themselves to check out her major work, including formidable turns in “Faces,” “Opening Night” and “Gloria” (the most mainstream-friendly of those titles, in which she plays the mistress of a gun-toting gangster charged with protecting a Puerto Rican orphan). My personal favorite is the nearly impossible-to-find “Minnie and Moskowitz” from 1971, if only because its rugged central couple, played by Rowlands and Cassel, struggle in such a recognizably human way.

Gina was there from the beginning of her husband John's film career, witnessing what is widely recognized as the birth of the American independent film movement. Technically, Rowlands was onstage, opposite Edward G. Robinson in "Middle of the Night," when Cassavetes made "Shadows." (She appears briefly in the film, but made a much greater impression in the nine other films they made together.) Rowlands served as his muse, and without such a force to inhabit her roles, Cassavetes' oeuvre would not have had the seismic impact it has on the course of screen acting.