DO YOU REMEMBER LOVE? (TV)
Summary
This dramatic television movie special stars Joanne Woodward as Barbara Hollis, a successful middle-aged poet and college professor who learns she has Alzheimer's, a progressively degenerative disease that attacks the brain and leads to pre-senile dementia. As the program begins, Barbara has just returned to teaching after a year-long sabbatical. She is happily married to George Hollis; has a caring son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren; and is a popular, unconventional professor with a biting wit and a tremendous facility for language. Upon returning to campus, Barbara learns that she is going to be recommended for tenure and that she may be nominated for the prestigious Longfellow Poet Laureate award -- bestowed only once every ten years, and never before to a woman. Amidst all of this excitement, Barbara's life begins to fall apart: She becomes forgetful with simple domestic tasks; she goes into a rage at her mother, Lorraine, over something that happened when she was a teenager; and later, she becomes incoherent and disoriented in class and simply walks out of the lecture hall. Lorraine tells George she suspects something is wrong with her daughter, but he shuts her out of his and Barbara's "private problem" and Lorraine realizes that George has been covering for Barbara's forgetfulness for some time. George asks for advice from a psychiatrist friend named Gerry who suggests she see a physician. When George expresses his concerns to her, Barbara becomes violent and strikes him. It is after this episode that she agrees to be tested. She reveals to the doctor that she really went on her sabbatical because she was having difficulty thinking and writing, and hoped the time away from school would help her get her thoughts together. After an exhaustive battery of tests, Barbara is diagnosed with Alzheimer's and learns that the disease, for which there is no cure, will destroy her normal brain functions and that her periods of lucidity will become briefer and briefer until she is non-functional. Barbara's case is unusually aggressive, and it is not long before George must label household items with name tags, friends disappear out of fear of her increasingly bizarre behavior, and Barbara loses her job. As Barbara begins to lose the battle, George must come to terms with his own terror, anger, and fear of letting others in -- including Lorraine. Meanwhile Barbara and George's son Tom is convinced by his wife to reach out and help his mother, whose illness he has been unable accept as real. All are thrilled when they are notified that Barbara has won the Longfellow Award. During her lucid hours she is consumed with writing her acceptance speech -- her last opportunity to express herself to the world before she loses herself. Commercials deleted.
Details
- NETWORK: CBS
- DATE: May 21, 1985 9:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 1:35:42
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T86:0264
- GENRE: Drama
- SUBJECT HEADING: Alzheimer's disease - Drama; Drama
- SERIES RUN: CBS - TV, 1985
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Dave Bell … Executive Producer
- Marilyn Hall … Co-Executive Producer
- Wayne Threm … Producer
- James E. Thompson … Producer
- Walter Halsey Davis … Co-Producer
- Joe Broido … Associate Producer
- Jeff Bleckner … Director
- Vickie Patik … Writer
- David Shire … Music by
- Joanne Woodward … Cast, Barbara Wyatt Hollis
- Richard Kiley … Cast, George Hollis
- Geraldine Fitzgerald … Cast, Lorraine Wyatt
- Jim Metzler … Cast, Tom Hollis
- Jordan Charney … Cast, Marvin Langdon
- Jerry Hardin … Cast, Dave McDonough
- Marilyn Jones … Cast, Helen Hollis
- Ron Rifkin … Cast, Gerry Kaplan
- Rose Gregorio … Cast, Betty Marcus
- Terry Willis … Cast, the Man Jogger
- Caroline Field … Cast, the Woman Jogger
- Andrea Barber … Cast, Jennifer
- Judith Barsi … Cast, Kathleen
- Joseph Brutsman … Cast, a Grad Student
- Sally R. Brown … Cast, a Grad Student
- Marilyn Bradfield … Cast, the Nurse
- Herb Mitchell … Cast, the Mailman
- Lee Garlington … Cast, the Second Mother
- Oceana Marr … Cast, the Receptionist
- Adele Gilbert … Cast, the Woman Patient
- Dorothy Meyer … Cast, the Social Director
- Hugo Stanger … Cast, Mr. Schulman
- Pat Crawford Brown … Cast, the Woman
- Connie Sawyer … Cast, Joan
- Elizabeth Hoffman … Cast, Lila
- Margaret Muse … Cast, Margaret
- Richard Kuller … Cast, the Emcee
- Carolyn Lagerfelt … Cast
- Charles Levin … Cast
- Craig Richard Nelson … Cast
- Duncan Ross … Cast