Ellen Albertini Dow, who appeared in more than 100 shows and movies in her long career, but is probably best known for her turn as the original rapping granny in Adam Sandler’s The Wedding Singer, died yesterday at 101 years old. Her agent “offered no details” on how she passed.
Before she covered “Rapper’s Delight,” Dow “worked with mimes Marcel Marceau and Jacques Lecoq in Paris and played the Borscht Belt as part of a comedy act before moving west to teach in the drama department at Los Angeles City College.” From there, she booked small, but memorable spots on practically every show in the 1980s and 1990s, including The Twilight Zone, The Golden Girls, Star Trek: The Next Generation, ER, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
One of her final roles was in a 2013 episode of New Girl. Here she is singing with Nick Kroll, who probably had a lot of questions about rapping for Sandler. We all did. R.I.P.
(Via Deadline)
