Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s disease, a late-life challenge for the Oscar-nominated actor who captivated Hollywood in the 1970s with her performance in “A Woman Under the Influence” and later portrayed a character with dementia in “The Notebook.”Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes, the director of “The Notebook,” revealed the diagnosis in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, telling the magazine that she had been living with the disease for five years.
“She’s in full dementia,” he said.
“And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”A former theater and television actress, Rowlands, 94, made 10 films across four decades with John Cassavetes, the independent film pioneer who was also her husband.
She was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress for two of them: “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which she plays a wife and mother who cracks under the burden of domestic harmony, and “Gloria” (1980), about a woman who helps a young boy escape the mob.
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Gena Rowlands, Oscar, ”, Nick Cassavetes, “, Rowlands, John Cassavetes, “ Gloria ”
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Hollywood, Entertainment, Academy