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Gena Rowlands has been marred with grim consequence of old age in a heartbreaking revelation by her son.
The 93-year-old actress, who starred in The Notebook as older version of Rachel McAdams’ character Allie, has Alzheimer’s disease.
In the film directed by her son Nick Cassavetes, Gena played a woman dealing with cognitive decline in the last moments of the iconic romance.
“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 said in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly.
“She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us,” he lamented.
According to the National Institute on Aging, Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, and is a “combination of age-related changes in the brain, along with genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors.”
Rowlands previously laid bare her initial reluctance to play the character in the Nicholas Sparks’ film adaptation, owing to her mother’s experience with 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. 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,” she told O magazine in 2004.