Jessica Gunning is set to star in a biopic covering the life of The Mamas And The Papas’ Cass Elliot, over 50 years after the singer’s death.
Elliot, also known as Mama Cass, was a founding member of the vocal group and went on to embark on a solo career after they disbanded. She released her final album, the live album ‘Don’t Call Me Mama Anymore’, in 1973 and died from heart failure a year later at the age of 32.
Now, the life of Elliot – born Naomi Cohen – will come to the big screen with the movie My Mama, Cass.
Baby Reindeer star Gunning will play Elliot in the biopic, which is based on a 2024 memoir by her daughter, Owen Elliot-Kugell, who was just seven when she lost her mother.
“I’ve wanted to tell her story for a really, really long time, and I didn’t know how to do it,” Elliot-Kugell told Rolling Stone ahead of the memoir’s release. “It’s kind of weird to say, but I feel like, in some ways, I know her better now.”
The film is currently in development, with Vertias Entertainment producing and writer Emma Forrest adapting. According to a press release, the movie is “not a traditional Mamas And The Papas biopic. It is a definitive Cass Elliot film, centred on her life, legacy, and the mother-daughter bond that shaped them both.”
The biopic aims to focus on the singer’s life and career, and finally dispel the rumour that Elliot died after choking on a ham sandwich. In 2020, a journalist and friend of Elliot, Sue Cameron, admitted that she popularised the rumour by writing it into her Hollywood Reporter obituary. She claimed she was asked to print it by Elliot’s manager because it was preferable to the implication that her death was associated with substance abuse.
According to her autopsy, Elliot died from a heart attack in her sleep after feeling unwell the previous evening, and there were no drugs in her system.
“I can’t believe we’re still talking about the sandwich after all these years,” Elliot-Kugell told Rolling Stone. “I started running my mom’s estate when I was 18. One of the first things I remember thinking is, ‘We’ve got to stop that ham sandwich rumour thing,’ because it was so painful.
“It wasn’t enough that we had lost her, to then be [made into] a joke. I’d say probably 50 per cent of the people don’t believe it now. The other 50 per cent probably still do.”
As for Gunning, she appears in the upcoming The Magic Faraway Tree movie, out on March 27. She’s also in the comedies Anxious People and Frank And Percy, which are both currently in post-production.