Gena Rowlands, the screen actor whose career spans over seven decades and includes two Oscar nominations and an honorary Academy Award, has Alzheimer’s disease, according to her son Nick Cassavetes.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly on the 20th anniversary of his film The Notebook, in which Rowlands played a character with the disease, Cassavetes said his mother, now 94 years old, was in “full dementia”. Rowlands memorably played Allie in the film, the older version of the character played by Rachel McAdams, whose dementia is tended to by her husband Noah (James Garner).
Shortly after the film was released in 2004, Rowlands spoke to O Magazine about the difficulty of the role, as her mother also suffered from Alzheimer’s.
“This last one – The Notebook, based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks – was particularly hard because I play a character who has Alzheimer’s,” Rowlands said. “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 that on set, the two “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. She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy – we lived it, she acted it and now it’s on us.”
The film, which co-starred Ryan Gosling, has since been adapted into a Broadway musical, with the Tony-nominated actor Maryann Plunkett in the role played on screen by Rowlands.
Known for her confident, unbridled performances in frequent collaborations with her husband, actor-director John Cassavetes, Rowlands was nominated for two best actress Academy Awards during her illustrious screen career, for A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980). She also won three Emmy awards, for The Betty Ford Story in 1987, Face of a Stranger in 1992 and Virginia in 2003, and received a lifetime achievement honorary Oscar in 2015 for her contributions to film.
Other film credits include Faces, Opening Night, Woody Allen’s Another Woman and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. Rowlands’s last on-screen role was in the 2014 comedy-drama Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks with Cheyenne Jackson. She retired from acting in 2015.
This article was amended on 25 June, 2024 to correct Gena Rowlands’s age. She turned 94 on 19 June.
