Ellen Albertini Dow obit

Ellen Albertini Dow, Actress, Dies at 101; Rapping Granny in ‘Wedding Singer’

She was not on the list.

Ellen Albertini Dow, who found acting success in her 70s and portrayed feisty grandmothers in the hit film comedies “Wedding Crashers” and “The Wedding Singer,” stealing the show in that one when she rapped onstage, died on Monday in Los Angeles. She was 101.

Her manager, Juliet Green, confirmed the death.

The sprightly Ms. Dow turned to film and television acting after retiring as a drama and acting teacher in the mid-1980s. She soon became a familiar guest star on television shows like “Seinfeld,” “Six Feet Under” and “My Name Is Earl,” and in films like “Road Trip,” “Patch Adams” and the two “Sister Act” movies.

Ms. Dow played a cocaine-abusing doyenne of disco in “54,” the 1998 paean to the nightclub Studio 54 starring Ryan Phillippe, Salma Hayek and Mike Myers. In “Wedding Crashers,” a 2005 Owen Wilson-Vince Vaughn comedy, she was the profane, homophobic matriarch of a blue-blooded family who insults her gay grandson during an excruciatingly awkward dinner.

Her most memorable performance was as the rapping grandmother in “The Wedding Singer” (1998), a romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore. Ms. Dow’s character had been singing the standard “Till There Was You” to her husband in front of a crowd at her 50th wedding anniversary celebration when she started rapping the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

Ms. Dow told The Daily News in New York in 2005 that Mr. Sandler and the film’s director, Frank Coraci, “thought it would take days and nights” for her to deliver a usable performance.

“As soon as I started to move to it, it just came naturally,” Ms. Dow said of “Rapper’s Delight.” “I still sing it all the time.”

Ellen Albertini was born on Nov. 26, 1913, Mount Carmel, Pa., the seventh child of Italian immigrants. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater from Cornell University, then moved to New York City, where she studied dance with Hanya Holm and Martha Graham. She also studied acting with Michael Shurtleff and Uta Hagen, performed in Yiddish theater with Molly Picon and Menasha Skulnik and worked with the mimes Marcel Marceau and Jacques Lecoq in Paris.

She married Eugene Dow, an actor, in 1951. They moved to Los Angeles, where she taught drama at Los Angeles City College. She and her husband later taught at Pierce College in the Woodland Hills neighborhood, where Ms. Dow lived at her death.

Mr. Dow died in 2004. No immediate family members survive.