Every great screen performance expands the medium in its own way, giving audiences something to respond to, while offering fresh ideas to future actors. A select few can be said to have redefined the craft entirely: 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, half a century after “A Woman Under the Influence” premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1974. Rowlands was the last to go from among a tight clique of titans — actors who transformed modern cinema: Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, Ben Gazzara and, of course, Rowlands’ late husband, actor-director John Cassavetes.

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Younger audiences who know Rowlands only as the memory-challenged older woman in “The Notebook” (directed by her son Nick Cassavetes) or for her Emmy-winning turn in “Hysterical Blindness” owe it to themselves to investigate her most important work, including formidable turns in “Faces,” “Opening Night” and “Gloria” (the most mainstream-friendly of those titles, in which she plays a pistol-packing gangster’s moll charged with protecting a Puerto Rican orphan). My personal favorite is 1971’s almost-impossible-to-find “Minnie and Moskowitz,” if only because the shaggy central couple, played by Rowlands and Cassel, struggle in such recognizably human ways.

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