The production company behind the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” is now taking on another Jewish music legend: Cass Elliot, who rose to fame as a member of The Mamas and the Papas.
Generations grew up on the voice of the star with the effervescent personality, who passed away at age 32. From “Dream a Little Dream of Me” to “Make Your Own Kind of Music,” which recently became a viral sensation, it’s about time that Elliot, one of the best singers of the 20th century, got her own reverent biopic.
Elliot will be played by award-winning English actress Jessica Gunning, known for her role in the Netflix hit series “Baby Reindeer.” Gunning continues a trend of casting English actresses as iconic Jewish women — from Felicity Jones’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg in “On the Basis of Sex” to Ella Hunt’s Gilda Radner in “Saturday Night.” Gunning is absolutely a great actor, one who can bring amazing comedic chops — which Elliot was known for — and also great emotion. We don’t know how well Gunning can sing, but we’re hoping the movie will feature many of Elliot’s own vocals.
While Gunning is not Jewish, the writer attached to the movie, which doesn’t have a director yet, is Jewish. Celebrated Jewish English author Emma Forrest, who wrote “Your Voice in My Head” and has penned a script for a movie about Jeff Buckley, has signed on a scriptwriter.
The movie, it seems, will honor the legacy of the woman born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore. It’s titled after a book written by Elliot’s daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, “My Mama Cass.” Just like the memoir, a tender and intimate exploration of Elliot’s life and legacy, it will work to dispel the pernicious falsehood surrounding Elliot’s 1974 death — that she died while choking on a ham sandwich, misinformation her then manager Alan Carr tried to promulgate so that people wouldn’t associate Elliot with drug use. In reality, she died in her sleep from a heart attack, likely due to the pressure that her crash diet and drug use put on her body.
That rumor about her death is a falsehood that made it into the pop culture zeitgeist, shared in movies like “Austin Powers” and the TV show “Lost,” turning the ending of an incredible musical legacy into a fat joke. And while Elliot often made herself the butt of such jokes throughout her life, she was a pioneer worth celebrating: funny and gorgeous, inside and out. By just being her full self, she helped so many young girls feel beautiful and worthy no matter their size.
There’s something so thrilling about a movie that will honor the way she deserves to be remembered.
Elliot was born in 1941. Her Jewish grandparents were immigrants from Russia. Her first dream was to be a comedic musical theater star. She dropped out of high school to tour with “The Music Man.” As a teen, she lost a coveted role to a young Barbra Streisand — that of Miss Marmelstein in the very Jewish “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” which wound up being Babs’s Broadway debut.
Like so many of us, I’ve loved Cass Elliot since I first heard her completely unique, powerful voice, and loved her even more when I discovered her humor and strength. Yet I felt particular kinship with her since I found out that for a short time, she was also a Jewish media professional. When her mother, Bess, told her she had to find a job, Cass worked for the Baltimore Jewish Times, where she was in charge of the society bits, the classified ads and the obituaries (which she did by scouring the Sunday paper and finding Jewish names). She joked in a 1972 interview that the job didn’t teach her much about the newspaper business, but that she did get a lot of bribes from Jewish mothers hoping to get their children’s weddings and bar mitzvahs to the top of the list.
Elliot’s Jewish newspaper career was, luckily for us, short-lived. While attending college in Washington D.C., she got into the folk music scene.
In 1965, she joined the New Journeyman with her former bandmate Denny Doherty, who was in that band with John Phillips. Phillips’s wife Michelle, who Owen says was a godmother figure to her after her mom’s death, also joined the group. Elliot allegedly came up with the group’s new name, The Mamas and The Papas. While they were only together for three years, they gave us hits to last a lifetime and helped launch Elliot’s solo career.
After two marriages that ended in divorce, Elliot welcomed her daughter, Owen, in 1967. Owen was just 7 when her mother passed away while in London for work. After that, she was raised by her aunt, Leah Kunkell, who was also a musician.
On Instagram, Owen shared a picture of Cass and Leah on her second birthday, captioned: “Just one picture can tell a story, and this one is no different. The Mom that gave birth to me on the left, and the one who raised me, holding me in her arms. Both are important, creating the person I am today. I’m filled with gratitude for them both.”
Aside from writing a memoir about her mother, Owen, a mother of two, also led a campaign to get her late mom a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
“I just want people to remember my mom’s legacy,” Elliot-Kugell told Variety after that campaign proved successful. “I’m sure she’d be over the moon. A hundred years from now, that star will still be here. If my mom knew the effect she’d had on so many people’s lives in making them feel good, that would have made her happy.”
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