Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s disease, per an update shared by her son, actor and director Nick Cassavetes in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. Cassavetes, directed 2004 romance film “The Notebook,” casting Rowlands as a character 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 told the outlet. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
In the movie, which was adapted by the from the 1996 Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name, Rowlands starred as the older version of Rachel McAdams’ Allie alongside the late James Garner and Ryan Gosling, who portrayed the older and younger version of Noah Calhoun.
Rowlands, a four-time Emmy winner and two-time Golden Globe winner, was twice nominated for the Academy Award for best actress in her films “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) and “Gloria” (1980). She received an honorary Oscar in 2015.