Provided

Ellen Dow '35, A.M. '38, enjoys the view from the audience at the Schwartz Center's Proscenium Theatre. She remembers thinking during her first Broadway appearance that the theater didn't compare to Cornell's Willard Straight performance space, where she got her start.

At under 5 feet tall, she's probably the shortest octogenarian actress in the business -- but Ellen Albertini Dow '35, A.M. '38, has made a big impact on the TV-watching and movie- and theater-going public.

Her most recent credit, at age 86, is the smash summer movie hit "The Wedding Crashers," in which she plays Grandma Mary Cleary, the mother of Christopher Walken's character. But the stage-and-screen star is perhaps best known for her role as the "rappin' grandma" in the 1998 Adam Sandler film "The Wedding Singer" (she performed the actual rapping for the role).

Dow has returned to Cornell only twice since graduating. The first time was in 1984, to witness the groundbreaking for Cornell's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. The second was last June to see the finished product and celebrate her 70th Cornell reunion.

"This facility is beyond imagination," said Dow during her tour of the six-story marble behemoth in June. "Cornell students really are spoiled. You don't even get this kind of treatment in Hollywood. Mr. Drummond would be ecstatic," she said, referring to Alexander M. Drummond, the Cornell theater professor with whom she studied for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees.

"At that time, in the early '30s, Cornell was rated the highest for theater, only behind Yale, and Yale didn't take women. So I begged my father to send me to Cornell to study theater," said Dow, who grew up in Mount Carmel, Penn.

While at Cornell, she acted, directed, danced and explored her love of mime. She remembers herself as being shy, but Drummond encouraged her natural comedic abilities. "Professor Drummond brought out everything good in you," she said.

After graduation, Dow headed for the bright lights of New York City and spent 11 years acting, choreographing, performing mime and studying with choreographers Martha Graham and Hanya Holt, and mime artists Jacques Le Coq and Marcel Marceau. She met her husband, Eugene Dow, in New York when she choreographed a show in which he was acting. They later moved to the West Coast and began teaching and freelancing. Ellen Dow taught acting at both Los Angeles City College and California State University-Northridge.

"At one point, later in life, my husband encouraged me to try my hand in film," said Dow. "Turns out film loved me and didn't care that I am short. I could stand on boxes -- something you can't do on stage. They call me 'one-take Ellen.' On stage you only get one chance, and I like to carry that work ethic into the film area as well."

She has acted in more than 20 films. In addition to "The Wedding Crashers" and "The Wedding Singer," some of the more well-known are: "Problem Child," "Sister Act," "Mighty Joe Young," "Carnival of the Souls," "Patch Adams" and "Road Trip." She also has made appearances in more than 30 television shows, including "Will and Grace," "Six Feet Under," "Scrubs," "Just Shoot Me," "Seinfeld," "Judging Amy," "E.R." and "The Golden Girls."

"I really used in the real world what I learned at Cornell," said Dow, whose soft spot for Cornell theater colored her perceptions of later fame. "I remember my first time stepping out onto a Broadway stage. I can remember thinking, 'Well, this isn't as great as performing onstage at Willard Straight.'"

This article is adapted from one by Leslie Morris that ran in the summer 2005 issue of Center Stage. It is used with permission of the author and publisher, Cornell's Department of Theatre, Film and Dance.