Gena Rowlands, an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor most recognizable to modern audiences for her emotional performance in The Notebook, has Alzheimer’s disease.
Rowland’s son, actor and director Nick Cassavetes, confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that his 94-year-old mother is living with the progressive form of dementia. Rowlands played the older version of Rachel McAdams’ main character, Allie Hamilton, in The Notebook – a character who also develops Alzheimer’s disease.
“I got my mom to play older Allie, and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and wanting to be authentic with it, and now, for the last five years, she’s had Alzheimer’s,” Cassavetes told the publication, recalling his time as director of the film. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
The movie version of The Notebook, based on Nicholas Sparks’ novel of the same name, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this week.
In a 2004 interview with O magazine, Rowlands opened up about the struggles her own mother, actor Lady Rowland, faced with the disease and why playing Allie was “particularly hard.”
“This last one — The Notebook, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks — was particularly hard because I play a character who has Alzheimer’s,” she said at the time. “I went through that with my mother, and if Nick hadn’t directed the film, I don’t think I would have gone for it — it’s just too hard. It was a tough but wonderful movie.”
Cassavetes told Entertainment Weekly working with his mother on set required a crucial retake, and while his mother wasn’t particularly happy about it, she handled it like a pro.
He recalled that in one particular scene, where older Allie finally remembers her longtime love, Noah (played by James Garner), studio executives requested that Rowlands cry more.
When Cassavetes told his mom that they needed to reshoot the scene, she wasn’t pleased. “She said, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re reshooting because of my performance?'”
“We go to reshoots, and now it’s one of those things where mama’s pissed and I had asked her, ‘Can you do it, mom?’ She goes, ‘I can do anything,'” he recalled.
And it only took one take.
“I promise you, on my father’s life, this is true: Teardrops came flying out of her eyes when she saw (Garner), and she burst into tears. And I was like, okay, well, we got that… It’s the one time I was in trouble on set.”
In 2015, Rowlands picked up an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Her film debut came in the 1958 comedy The High Cost of Living. She also received Oscar nominations for her work in 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence and 1980’s Gloria.
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