Last Years
Cassavetes directed the film Gloria (1980), featuring Rowlands as a Mob moll who tries to protect an orphan boy whom the Mob wants to kill. Rowlands earned another Best Actress nomination for it. In 1982, Cassavetes starred in Paul Mazursky's Tempest, which costarred Rowlands, Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald, and Raúl Juliá.
After receiving the prognosis from his doctor that he had six months to live, Cassavetes made Love Streams (1984) which featured him as an aging playboy who suffers the overbearing affection of his recently divorced sister. It was entered into the 34th Berlin International Film Festival where it won the Golden Bear. The film is often considered Cassavetes' "last film", in that it brought together many aspects of his previous films and also in that he despised the film he made afterwards. Big Trouble (1986), was taken over during filming by Andrew Bergman who wrote the original screenplay. Cassavetes came to refer to the film as "the aptly titled 'Big Trouble'", since the studio vetoed many of his decisions for the film and eventually edited most of the film in a way which Cassavetes disagreed with.
In January 1987, Cassavetes was facing health problems but having outlasted his doctor's prognosis, wrote the three-act play Woman of Mystery and succeeded in bringing it to the stage in May and June at the Court Theater.
Cassavetes worked during the last year of his life to produce a last film which was to be titled She's Delovely. He was in talks with Sean Penn to star, though legal and financial hurdles proved insurmountable and the project was forgotten about until after Cassavetes's death, when it was finally made as She's So Lovely.
Read more about this topic: John Cassavetes
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in years ... there is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)