Hear
This year marks twenty years since the premiere of Diary of a passion, the romantic drama starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams that told a story within a story. On the one hand there was the story of Noah and Allie, two young lovers separated by social and economic differences, told by an older man to a woman with Alzheimer’s in the nursing home where they both lived. In the role of that old woman who barely remembers her name and does not recognize that the story she hears is that of her own romance nor that the person telling it to her is her husband, she appeared Gena Rowlands, the icon actress of American independent cinema and favorite interpreter of John Cassavetes, who was also his partner.
Of course, for all the recognition that the duo accumulated with films like A woman under the influence, Glory and opening night, among others, Rowlands’ most popular role was that of that woman going through the symptoms of dementia. A fiction that years later became a sad reality: as part of a note to celebrate twenty years of Diary of a passion, Nick Cassavetes, the film’s director and Rowland’s son, told Entertainment Weekly that his 94-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease..
“I got my mom to play Allie when she was older and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s in an attempt to portray it with the greatest respect and fidelity possible, and now she has been suffering from the disease for five years.. My grandmother, her mother, also had it. And she now has dementia, so she is very crazy: she acted it out and now she is experiencing it in real life,” the director explained to the aforementioned American media.
At the time of the premiere of Diary of a passion (available at Max), Rowlands had already revealed in an interview that, of all her characters, Allie’s had been one of the ones that had affected her the most because the story based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks forced her to remember what her mother had passed when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “From what I experienced with her, if Nick had not been the director of the film, I don’t think I would have agreed to do it. It was too painful for me. In the end it turned out to be a tough but wonderful film at the same time”said the actress in 2004.
Since then, Rowlands participated in series such as monk and Numb3rsand starred in films such as The master key (2004) and Broken English (2007), directed by his daughter Zoe Cassavetes. Her last work was in the comedy-drama Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks2014.
Beyond the fact that the film boosted the careers of Gosling and McAdams and recovered for younger audiences the incomparable James Garner – who played the elderly version of Noah -, the truth is that none of the members of its cast, much less his production team imagined its lasting success. In fact, Cassavetes recalled that when filming wrapped, studio executives were not convinced that the film was emotional enough. The solution they suggested was to ask Rowlands to cry more intensely at the key moment in the film, when the elderly Allie finally remembers who she is, that the story she is hearing is her own and the narrator is Noah, her husband and great love.
“It wasn’t easy telling my mother that we had to reshoot that scene. She was not at all happy with the executives’ comment“, recalled the director in the publication on the film’s twentieth anniversary. “When we finally re-shot it, she was still angry but she told me that she could do what they asked of us. And she did it in one take. I swear on my father’s memory that as soon as I said action and Garner appeared on the scene, tears began to well up in her eyes and my mother sobbed uncontrollably. It was the only problem we had during filming,” explained Cassavetes about that artistic and family collaboration that resulted in an event that, two decades later, is still the film that many viewers turn to when they want to see “one to cry.”
