The Notebook star Gena Rowlands’ son Nick Cassavetes has confirmed that his mother has Alzheimer’s disease while speaking with Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday during the film’s 20th anniversary celebration.
“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,” added the 65-year-old director.
The 94-year-old actress played the well known role of old Allie Hamilton in the tear-jerking film who ironically had dementia. Now Nick has revealed that his mother is “in full dementia, and it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”
During the film’s time frame Gena recalled that she chose to play the role of Allie after witnessing her own mother struggle with the 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…It was a tough but wonderful movie,” the actress shared to O Magazine.
Despite the Nicholas Sparks novel being a very heartwrenching storyline, the film has gone on to be an iconic movie for each generation. “It’s always a shock to hear that as much time has gone by as it has, but it makes sense…It seems to have worked, and I’m very proud of it,” the filmmaker told EW.
The film who starred Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams has gone such a long way that now it is gaining its own Broadway musical. Rachel shared her thoughts on the upcoming project in an interview with Paul Wontorek for The Broadway Show with Tamsen Fadal. “I can’t wait to see it…I think it’s so exciting. To see it take on a whole other life like this, it blows my mind,” she shared. “We didn’t even know if anyone would see this movie when we were making it, when we were drowning in the rain…There wasn’t rain, they would pull the rain out of the bottom of the lake from fire hoses…It was a really powerful, stinging rain.”