Cleo Rose Elliott’s life was full of luck. She grew up in the bright lights of Hollywood as the daughter of actors Sam Elliott and Katharine Ross.
Elliott could have easily followed in the footsteps of her famous parents, thanks to her celebrity connections, good looks, and undeniable musical talent. But when she was 26, she got very angry and used scissors to sta*b her mother in the arm.
Ross got a restraining order against her daughter, and for a moment it looked like Elliott’s actions would tear the close-knit family apart. Since then, though, the mother and daughter have been seen together at red carpet events all over Hollywood.
Ross may have forgiven Elliott for what happened, but the young model and singer’s once-promising music career never fully recovered.
Cleo Rose Elliott’s Early Life In The Hollywood Spotlight
Sam Elliott and Katharine Ross first worked together on the set of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, but they didn’t meet until 1978, when they were both in the movie The Legacy.
Elliott’s first wife was Ross, but Ross had been married four times before she married Elliott. The couple got married in May 1984, and their daughter Cleo Rose Elliott was born on September 17, 1984, in Malibu, California.
The Malibu Times says that Elliott chose to go in a more musical direction than her parents did. As a child, she learned to play the flute and the guitar, but she always liked singing better.
She went to Malibu High for three years and then graduated from Colin McEwan High School. She then went to the Joanne Baron/D.W. Brown Acting Studio in Santa Monica, California, to study music for four years.
She got a short-term job on the reality show SexyHair while she was in acting school, and she also did some modeling to pay the bills. Elliott then went on to study opera with Charity Chapman, a well-known singer and songwriter.
Elliott’s first album, No More Lies, came out in 2008. It was a semi-commercial hit. Elliott’s musical influences were mostly hard rock, even though her musical background was in Italian opera. She has said that she likes Guns N’ Roses and Led Zeppelin’s music better than Verdi’s.
“The only way I know how to write is straight from my heart,” she told the Malibu Times in 2008. “Of course, the songs on No More Lies are about love. Getting and losing love. But it isn’t about one person in particular.” She also told the outlet that after the album came out, she was going to take a break and hang out with her pets before putting out more music.
The next time Cleo Rose Elliott was in the news, it was for something that had nothing to do with music.
Why Did Katharine Ross’ Daughter S-tab Her 6 Times With A Pair Of Sci-ssors?
In 1992, a PEOPLE article about Katharine Ross talked about how much she liked spending time with her husband and Cleo Rose Elliott, who was seven years old at the time. But as Elliott grew up, that changed.
Ross told the Los Angeles County Superior Court, “Even when I was a little girl, Cleo verbally and emotionally abused me. But when I was 12 or 13, she became more violent.”
People says that on March 2, 2011, these violent tendencies came to a head. On that day, Elliott got angry. She told her mother, “I want to k*ill you,” and then kicked in a kitchen cabinet door.
She started to follow Ross around the house after that. Elliott cut the phone line when Ross tried to call the police. She then threatened to gouge out her mother’s eyes.
Then, Elliott used the scissors to cut Ross six times in the arm. Ross asked the court for a restraining order because Elliott was “using enough force to pierce my skin through my shirt and leave me with marks that are still visible today.”
But why did Katharine Ross’s daughter st*ab her? There isn’t much information about what happened. No one knows for sure what caused the outburst, and Ross’s claims about Elliott’s violent past and how bad her injuries were have never been proven.
Even so, on March 8, 2011, a judge told Cleo Rose Elliott to stay 100 yards away from Ross and her home, car, and place of work until a hearing later that month made the restraining order official.
This also meant that Elliott and his wife had to leave their home in Malibu. And the order said that police would have to go with her onto the property so she could get her things.
But when neither Elliott nor Ross showed up for the March 30, 2011 hearing, the restraining order was taken away. Ross said soon after that she was working on her relationship with Cleo Rose Elliott.
Cleo Rose Elliott Has Maintained A Low Profile Since The Incident
She has, however, walked the red carpet with her family, such as when her father was nominated for an Oscar in 2018 for his role in A Star Is Born.
Elliott and her mother’s relationship seems to have gotten a lot better. In 2017, when Ross and her husband Sam Elliott were both in The Hero, they did an interview together for Indie Entertainment News Magazine.
Then, Cleo Rose Elliott gushed about her parents, saying, “They’re both so talented, and it just makes me so proud of them.”
So why did Katharine Ross’s daughter sta*b her? We may never know the whole truth about what happened, but it looks like the family is still as close as ever, even though there are scars.
