Gena Rowlands Has Alzheimer’s Disease, Son Nick Cassavetes Says
deadline.comGena Rowlands, whose stellar roster of film roles includes performances in A Woman Under the Influence, Faces and Gloria, has Alzheimer’s disease and is “in full dementia,” her son Nick Cassavetes says.
Cassavetes, the son of Rowlands and the late actor-director John Cassavetes, revealed the sad news in an interview with Entertainment Weekly on the 20th anniversary of the film The Notebook.
Cassavetes directed the film in which his mother played Allie, a woman with dementia. “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 says. “She’s in full dementia.
And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.” Shortly after the film was released in 2004, Rowlands, now 93, said in an interview with O magazine that her own mother had suffered from the disease. “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.
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