Sadly, one of the more tragic aspects of the beloved romantic drama The Notebook has seemingly come true. Gena Rowlands (93), who played the dementia-stricken older version of Allie in the 2004 hit, is dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, according to her son Nick Cassavetes, who also directed the film.
“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 Entertainment Weekly. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy—we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
Nick Cassavetes is the son of Rowlands and actor-filmmaker John Cassavetes, a pioneer of independent cinema best known for his starring role in Rosemary’s Baby and for directing his wife in A Woman Under the Influence. John Cassavetes also cast his mother-in-law, Lady Rowlands (her name, not a title), in some of his films, and she, too, struggled with Alzheimer’s during her later years.
“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,” Gena Rowlands told O magazine in 2004. “It’s just too hard. It was a tough but wonderful movie.”
In the film, the older version of Noah (James Garner) reads the love story of their younger counterparts (played by Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling) to his wife, who by the end has a moment of clarity and recognizes him. It is doubly heart-breaking, then, when she again becomes confused and forgets Noah. In the final moments, the pair die in their sleep holding one another, a bittersweet and very romantic moment. We wish the Rowlands-Cassavetes family the best.
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