Actor Gena Rowlands, an Emmy and Golden Globe winner greatest identified to trendy audiences for her heart-wrenching efficiency in “The Notebook,” has Alzheimer’s illness.
Director and actor Nick Cassavetes, who’s Rowlands’ son, confirmed his 94-year-old mom’s analysis in an interview with Entertainment Weekly printed Tuesday. Rowlands portrayed the older model of Rachel McAdams’ character, Allie Hamilton, in “The Notebook,” which Cassavetes directed.
“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 informed the publication. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
Kevork Djansezian through Getty Photographs
A Wisconsin native, Rowlands made her movie debut within the 1958 comedy “The High Cost of Living” after working in tv and on the Broadway stage. She and her late husband, actor John Cassavetes, would go on to seem in a complete of 10 motion pictures collectively, together with 1974’s “A Woman Under the Influence” and 1980’s “Gloria,” for which she obtained Oscar nominations. In 2015, she picked up an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
When “The Notebook” was launched in 2004, it gave Rowlands an opportunity to endear herself to a brand new technology of followers. Tailored from Nicholas Sparks’ 1996 novel, the blockbuster romance follows a star-crossed Southern couple’s tender relationship and eventual marriage from the Nineteen Forties to the current day.
Because the older, dementia-stricken Allie, Rowlands appeared primarily in scenes reverse actor James Garner, who portrayed the older model of Ryan Gosling’s character, Noah Calhoun.
Talking to O Journal after “The Notebook” grew to become a smash, Rowlands described the difficult strategy of taking part in a personality with Alzheimer’s after witnessing her personal mom’s expertise with the illness.
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“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,” she stated on the time. “It was a tough but wonderful movie.”
In his chat with EW, Cassavetes shared a heartwarming anecdote about having to ask his mom to return to the set of “The Notebook” for reshoots after the studio felt her character hadn’t cried sufficient in a single essential scene.
“She said, ‘Let me get this straight. We’re reshooting because of my performance?’” he recalled. In the long run, nevertheless, he stated Rowlands was an expert: “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, OK, well, we got that … It’s the one time I was in trouble on set.”
