Requiem for Rowlands: acting brought a lesson

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This article was published 17/08/2024 (784 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you don’t speed, Madison, Wisconsin is an eleven hour drive from Winnipeg’s Confusion Corner.

I don’t need Google to tell me. I’ve done it. I saw a great many interesting things and people in that lovely university town, which happens to be the state capital. I wish I could tell you that I had lunch there with a wonderful actress who was born there. But I did not.

When Gena Rowlands passed away this week, less than a month after her 94th birthday, I wanted to read more about her background. I assumed she was from the American heartland. But when I discovered she was from Wisconsin, I felt a sense of joy.

I’ve had a thing for Wisconsin for nearly half a century, not because of its fascinating politics, or the Green Bay Packers, or the Miller beer that made Milwaukee famous. It was “The Young and the Restless,” the world’s most watched daytime drama, set in the fictional town of Genoa City, Wisconsin.

Michelle Stafford is one of its best known faces. She has played Phyllis Summers for nearly 30 years — and she was inspired to become an actress because of Gena Rowlands performance in “A Woman under the Influence,” the signature movie of Rowlands’ career.

Although Rowlands won four Emmy Awards, one daytime Emmy and two Golden Globes, “A Woman under the Influence” is what got her closest to Oscar. She was nominated for best actress. When a very young Michelle Stafford watched that 1974 smash, it inspired her and no doubt many other young women to try their hand at acting. “My acting inspiration, she was. She was consistently beyond spectacular. A true original,” posted Stafford on her Instagram.

I must tell you that I wasn’t motivated to write about Ms Rowlands because of where she grew up and who she inspired. The elephant in this room is Alzheimer’s. Gena Rowlands lived with it for the last five years of her life. As all the official journals of entertainment have reported, she died this week in Indian Wells, California, of the complications that visit the human body after Alzheimer’s hobbles the mind.

It was “The Notebook” a movie about Alzheimer’s that Gena Rowlands starred in 20 years ago, that forced my hand to avoid political analysis on this Saturday. “The Notebook” was directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes. It also starred Canadian actress Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, James Garner and Sam Shepard.

I don’t want to be a spoiler by giving you a too-detailed account of the film. But I do need to tell you that, like so many members of families visited by Alzheimer’s, the movie was therapeutic for me. It hit the screens in 2004, the same year that my father received the dreaded diagnosis.

Mike Adler was a hunted man in 1944. The country he was born in betrayed him. Hungary joined Hitler’s Nazi empire. The government of Hungary was at first a reluctant accomplice in genocide. But as the war was coming to end, Hitler insisted that Hungary develop an enthusiasm for mass deportation and mass murder.

Over 800,000 Jews were living in Hungary before she partnered with Hitler. Over half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered. They included my father’s parents, two siblings, and many other members of his extended family.

A Roman Catholic friend of my father’s took a big risk in 1944, demanding that my father not show up at the train station for deportation to Auschwitz. He smuggled my dad across the Hungarian border to Romania. And that is where Mike Adler did farm labour until the Soviets showed up, picked him up, and put him on a train for Siberia, where he spent three years in Stalin’s Gulag.

When I was a young lad being mentored by my Dad, I thought of him as Superman. He dodged the ovens of Auschwitz and survived three years in the hell of Siberia. What on Earth could Mike Adler not accomplish?

Tragically, my superman father faced his kryptonite in his eighties. Alzheimer’s succeeded where Hitler and Stalin could not. And it was Gena Rowlands playing the role of Allie, a dementia patient, who helped me develop some emotional connection with what my father’s mind was experiencing.

Thank you Mike Adler for marrying Mum and giving me life. Thank you, Gena Rowlands, for helping me to read the final chapter of Mike Adler’s life.

Rest in peace, Ms Rowlands.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. charles@charlesadler.com