Legendary actor Gena Rowlands, an honorary Oscar recipient and four-time Emmy winner, has Alzheimer's disease, her son says.
Director Nick Cassavetes told Entertainment Weekly that his 94-year-old mother, who played a character with dementia in his beloved 2004 film "The Notebook," has the same illness. In the film, Rowlands played an older version of Allie, the same character portrayed by Rachel McAdams.
"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. “She’s in full dementia. And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
Rowlands shared in a 2004 interview with O magazine that her performance in "The Notebook" was informed by her experience with her own mother, Lady Rowlands, who also had Alzheimer's disease.
"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," she told the magazine. "It was a tough but wonderful movie."
While Rowlands has family history of the disease which does play a role, the biggest risk factor is age. Alzheimer’s isn’t necessarily caused by a single gene, but multiple genes in combination with environmental factors and lifestyle. "Once you pass 65 we do see the rates go up," Dr. Tara Narula, NBC News medical contributor told TODAY.
Dementia has no cure and while battling it, "someone really does lose the essence of his or her self," Narula said.
"You see patients go from mild, to moderate, to severe stages," she added. So, in the beginning, there may be things like memory impairment which we all think about and then changes in your ability to do simple tasks, disorientation to time and space, trouble with language, feeling like you don't know who people are, where you are, confusion, mood changes, judgment changes."
The life expectancy for the disease is typically four to eight years after diagnosis, but some people live for an additional 10 to 20 years.
Cassavetes recalled to Entertainment Weekly how the studio wanted him to reshoot a scene in "The Notebook" with Rowlands' character crying more at the end while remembering her longtime love played by James Garner.
“We go to reshoots, and now it’s one of those things where mama’s pissed and I had asked her, ‘Can you do it, mom?’ She goes, ‘I can do anything,’” Cassavetes said. "I promise you, on my father’s life, this is true: Teardrops came flying out of her eyes when she saw (Garner), and she burst into tears. And I was like, okay, well, we got that... It’s the one time I was in trouble on set.”
Rowlands is also a two-time Golden Globe winner who was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2015 for lifetime achievement. She was nominated for Academy Awards for best actress in 1974 for "Woman Under the Influence" and in 1980 for "Gloria," which were both directed by her late husband, John Cassavetes.
She began her career on Broadway and on television in the early 1950s before embarking on a film career, according to her Oscars profile. Rowlands appeared in 40 feature films, most recently in 2014 in "Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks."
