Gena Rowlands suffers from Alzheimer’s: the intense personal and professional relationship with John Cassavetes that inspired her children (and reached Noah’s Diary)

“I convinced my mother to play the elderly version of Allie and we spent a lot of time talking about Alzheimer’s, because we wanted to portray the disease authentically,” she said. film director Nick Cassavetes In an interview published yesterday in Entertainment Weekly. “And now, for the last five years, she has lived with Alzheimer’s. He suffers from total dementia and it seems a little crazy: she played it on screen and now we live with it.”

Cassavetes is of course talking about actress Gena Rowlands (Cambria, Wisconsin, 1930), who gave life to the same character, already in advanced age, that he embodied Rachel McAdams in the iconic romantic film Noa’s diary (2004), with Ryan Gosling and the already deceased James Garner playing his great love. As the millions of people who have seen it know, the film addresses senile dementia in a very emotional way, and now unfortunately reality imitates fiction.

Rowlands, unlike Allie, reaches this last stage without the one who was the love of her life, revered filmmaker John Cassaveteswho died still young, in 1989 and before turning 60, due to complications from liver cirrhosis (it is true that she later remarried the businessman Robert Forrest in 2012, more than 20 years after Cassavetes’ death).

Their intense relationship defined their life and professional careers: Rowlands, who grew up idolizing Bette Davis, met Cassavetes in the early 1950s, when They were both students at American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA) from New York.

“Before I met Gena, I was a bachelor who went through life torturing people,” John told Ray Carney, who later captured it in his essential volume Cassavetes by Cassavetes. “I think that’s okay when you’re young. When I saw it, I knew! The first time I saw it, I was with an actor, John Ericson, and I said: ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.’