Ellen Albertini Dow

Ellen Albertini Dow was an American character actress and drama teacher who specialized in feisty old ladies and began acting on screen only in the 1980s, in her seventies. Born in Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania in 1913, she studied dance and piano as a child, earned bachelor's and master's degrees in theater from Cornell University, and trained with Uta Hagen and Michael Shurtleff before teaching drama at Los Angeles City College and Los Angeles Pierce College. Her best known role was Rosie, the rapping grandmother in The Wedding Singer (1998), and her films also included Wedding Crashers (2005), 54 (1998) and Sister Act (1992), where she played a choir nun. Television audiences knew her from guest parts on The Golden Girls and Will & Grace. She died in 2015.