[3][4] As a director, Cassavetes became known for a string of critically acclaimed independent dramas including Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), and Love Streams (1984).

His films employed an actor-centered approach which prioritized raw character relationships and "small feelings" while rejecting traditional Hollywood storytelling, method acting, and stylization.

He frequently collaborated with American actress Gena Rowlands (to whom he was married from 1954 until his death in 1989) and friends Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel.

Cassavetes attended Blair Academy in New Jersey and spent a semester at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, but was expelled due to his failing grades.

[c][9] He spent a few weeks hitchhiking to Florida and then transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, encouraged by recently enrolled friends who told him the school was "packed with girls".

By 1956, Cassavetes had begun teaching an alternative to method acting in his own workshop—co-founded with friend Burt Lane in New York City—in which performance would be based on character creation rather than back-story or narrative requirements.

Cassavetes raised the funds for the production from friends and family, as well as listeners to Jean Shepherd's late-night radio talk-show Night People.

Cassavetes played bit-parts in B pictures and in television serials, until gaining notoriety in 1955 as a vicious killer in The Night Holds Terror, and as a juvenile delinquent in the live TV drama Crime in the Streets.

Cassavetes would repeat this performance credited as an “introducing” lead in the 1956 film version, which also included another future director, Mark Rydell, as his gang mate.

In the late 1950s, Cassavetes guest-starred in Beverly Garland's groundbreaking crime drama, Decoy, about a New York City woman police undercover detective.

[14] Cassavetes directed two movies for Hollywood in the early 1960s: Too Late Blues (1961); A Child Is Waiting (1963) starring Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland.

In 1964, he again co-starred with his wife, this time in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour anthology program, and in 1965, he appeared on ABC's western series, The Legend of Jesse James.

The films in which he acted with this intention include Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), the motorcycle gang movie Devil's Angels (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, the Guy Woodhouse lead (originally intended for Robert Redford) in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968), and The Fury (1978).

[20] In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Gazzara plays a small-time strip-club owner with an out-of-control gambling habit, pressured by mobsters to commit a murder to pay off his debt.

Alone and unloved by her colleagues, afraid of aging and always removed from others due to her stardom, she succumbs to alcohol and hallucinations after witnessing a young fan accidentally die.

[22][23] In 1982, Cassavetes starred in Paul Mazursky's Tempest, which co-starred Rowlands, Susan Sarandon, Molly Ringwald, Raúl Juliá and Vittorio Gassman.

The trio of plays included versions of Canadian playwright Ted Allan's The Third Day Comes and Love Streams, the latter of which served as the blueprint for Cassavetes' 1984 film of the same name.

[25] Cassavetes made the Cannon Films-financed[26][27] Love Streams (1984), which featured him as an aging playboy who suffers the overbearing affection of his recently divorced sister.

[29] In January 1987, Cassavetes was facing health problems, but he wrote the three-act play Woman of Mystery and brought it to the stage in May and June at the Court Theatre, Los Angeles.

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' death, when his son Nick finally directed it as She's So Lovely (1997).

"[32] His films aim to capture "small feelings" often repressed by Hollywood filmmaking, emphasizing intimate character examination and relationships rather than plot, backstory, or stylization.

[34] Cassavetes also disregarded the "impressionistic cinematography, linear editing, and star-centred scene making" fashionable in Hollywood and art films.

Cassavetes worked to create a comfortable and informal environment where actors could freely experiment with their performances and go beyond acting clichés or "programmed behaviors.

[13] Instead, he held that acting should be an expression of creative joy and exuberance, with emphasis put on the character's creation of "masks" in the process of interacting with other people.

[39] He claimed that "stylistic unity drains the humanity out of a text [...] The stories of many different and potentially inarticulate people are more interesting than a contrived narrative that exists only in one articulate man's imagination.

"[39] The manner in which Cassavetes employed improvisation is frequently misunderstood: with the exception of the original version of Shadows, his films were tightly scripted.

In the 2005 Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair, one article features a tribute to Cassavetes by three members of his stock company, Rowlands, Gazzara, and Falk.

In September 2004, The Criterion Collection produced a Region 1 DVD box set of his five independent films: Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night.

Alexandra Cassavetes directed the documentary Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession in 2004, and in 2006 served as 2nd Unit Director on her brother Nick's film, Alpha Dog.

The New Yorker wrote that Cassavetes "may be the most influential American director of the last half century"—this in announcing that all the films he directed, plus others he acted in, were being screened in a retrospective tribute at the Brooklyn Academy of Music throughout July 2013.