Gena Rowlands returns to move us, and this time not on the big screen but in life. The great American actress has Alzheimer’s: it was announced by her son Nick Cassavetes who 20 years ago directed her in the film The Notebook alongside James Garner and the then very young Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.
When life, tragically, imitates art. In the 2004 film, based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks inspired by the true story of her wife’s grandparents, Gena played the part of an octogenarian who lives in a retirement home after being struck by the disease that steals her memory . “Twenty years ago I convinced my mother to play the role of older Allie. We spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s and how to portray a case authentically and now, for the last five years, she has it,” the 65 year old director. Gena at this point “is in full dementia. And it’s so strange: we had lived it, she had acted it, and now she is with us again”, he added, alluding to the illness that had also affected her mother of Rowlands, the actress Lady Rowlands in her old age.
At the time of the release of The Notebook, Gena explained how difficult it had been for her to live that part, precisely because she had gone through the ordeal of her mother’s illness. “If Nick hadn’t been the director I wouldn’t have accepted it”, she said, speaking of a “difficult and at the same time wonderful” film. In the romantic drama available today on many streaming platforms Gosling and McAdams are a young couple who fall in love during the 1940s. Their story is read in the present in a notebook by an older man (James Garner), who tells the story to Rowlands’ character. It turns out in the end that they are the protagonists of the love story in the notebook and Allie bursts into tears in a rare moment of clarity, recognizing in her interlocutor the man she has loved all her life.
The film grossed $117 million at the global box office at the time and is still considered one of the most popular romance films of the early 2000s. Gena Rowlands is 94 years old. Famous for the ten films directed by her husband John Cassavetes including A Woman Under the Influence in 1974 and Gloria in 1980 for which she was nominated for an Oscar as best actress, in 2015 she received an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement. Her last film was, in 2014, the comedy Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks with Cheyenne Jackson.
Reproduction reserved © Copyright ANSA
