Betsy Palmer (1926 to 2015) was the American actress who played Mrs. Voorhees, the killer camp cook in Friday the 13th (1980).
The whole thing started with a dead Mercedes. Betsy Palmer’s car gave out on Interstate 95 on the drive home to Connecticut, “one terrible night” as the Los Angeles Times told it, and a replacement was going to cost her about $10,000. A low-budget horror picture was offering ten days of work at $1,000 a day. She did the arithmetic, took the job, bought a Volkswagen Scirocco, and walked out of a summer-camp kitchen as one of the most famous mothers in horror.
Quick Specs
| Born | November 1, 1926, East Chicago, Indiana (as Patricia Betsy Hrunek) |
| Died | May 29, 2015, in hospice care near her home in Danbury, Connecticut |
| Horror role | Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th (1980), directed by Sean S. Cunningham |
| Pay for the role | $10,000: ten days on set at $1,000 a day |
| Sequels | A brief, credited return in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981); archive footage only after that |
| Television | Live drama in the Golden Age, a regular panelist on I’ve Got a Secret through 1967, the Today Girl on Today, Knots Landing (1989 to 1990) |
| Films of the 1950s | The Long Gray Line, Mister Roberts, Queen Bee (all 1955), The Tin Star (1957), The Last Angry Man (1959) |
| Broadway | Original roles from The Grand Prize (1955) to The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976); replacement runs in Cactus Flower (1967 to 1968) and Same Time, Next Year (1977 to 1978) |
| Training | The Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University, Chicago; a life member of the Actors Studio |
| Marriage | Dr. Vincent J. Merendino, 1954 to 1971 |
| Child | Daughter Melissa Merendino |
Who She Was
She was born Patricia Betsy Hrunek on November 1, 1926, in East Chicago, Indiana. Her father, Rudolph Vincent Hrunek, was a Czech immigrant, and her mother was Marie Hrunek, born Marie Love. Betsy Palmer is the name on every credit that follows.
She studied drama at DePaul University in Chicago, at the Goodman School of Drama, the school that began at the Art Institute of Chicago and is now DePaul’s Theatre School. In 1951 she moved to New York, and the television work followed. She also became a life member of the Actors Studio.
In 1954 she married Dr. Vincent J. Merendino, a physician. They divorced in 1971, after seventeen years of marriage, and their daughter, Melissa Merendino, survived her.
Betsy Palmer died on May 29, 2015, in hospice care near her home in Danbury, Connecticut. Her longtime manager, Brad Lemack, announced her death, from natural causes. The New York Times summed up the arc in the headline of its obituary: “From TV Panelist to ‘Friday the 13th’ Villainess.” The villainess was a role she played for ten days, in a career that ran more than half a century.
The Work, and What She Did in It
Live Television and the Panel Years
Palmer arrived in New York just as television drama was being performed live, with no second take, and she worked in it steadily. Her credits run through the great anthology series of the period: Studio One, Playhouse 90, Kraft Television Theatre, The Philco Television Playhouse and The U.S. Steel Hour.
Two of those live broadcasts stand out. On May 24, 1953, The Philco Television Playhouse on NBC aired Marty, Paddy Chayefsky’s original teleplay, with Rod Steiger in the title role. Palmer played Virginia. Five years later, in 1958, she played Kitty Duval in a Playhouse 90 production of The Time of Your Life, and the Washington Post later noted that she “received enthusiastic reviews playing a regretful prostitute.”
Then there was the other television career, the one that made her a household face. Palmer was a long-running regular panelist on I’ve Got a Secret, the CBS game show, and she stayed with it until the original run’s finale in 1967. In the late 1950s she was also the Today Girl on NBC’s Today, in the Dave Garroway era. She had a working theory about moving between drama and the game shows, which she gave J.P. Shanley of the New York Times in July 1956: “If you appear too often in dramatic parts, you become tiresome. The public, in a sense, is fickle. They don’t want to see too much of you. They look for new faces.”
Hollywood, 1955 to 1959
Her film career was short and packed with big names. In 1955 alone she made three pictures. In John Ford’s The Long Gray Line she played Kitty Carter, opposite Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara. In Mister Roberts she played Lt. Ann Girard, leading the group of Navy nurses, with Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon in the cast. In Queen Bee, a Joan Crawford vehicle, she played Carol Lee Phillips.
In the western The Tin Star (1957) she was Nona Mayfield, a widow and the love interest of Henry Fonda’s bounty hunter, with Anthony Perkins co-starring. Her last film of the decade was The Last Angry Man (1959), where she played a character named Thrasher.
After 1959 she went back to television and the stage, and the movies would not see her again until a script about a summer camp arrived two decades later.
Broadway
On Broadway, Palmer played Kate Wilson in The Grand Prize (1955), Sally Mackenzie in Affair of Honor (1956) and Lady Dungavel in Roar Like a Dove (1964). She took over the role of Stephanie in Cactus Flower, playing it from November 20, 1967, to November 23, 1968.
The big original lead came in 1976, when she played Alma Winemiller in Tennessee Williams’s The Eccentricities of a Nightingale. A year later she stepped into Same Time, Next Year as Doris, playing the part from October 24, 1977, to September 3, 1978. Both Cactus Flower and Same Time, Next Year were replacement runs: she took over parts that other actresses had created.
Friday the 13th (1980)
Friday the 13th opened on May 9, 1980, released by Paramount. Sean S. Cunningham directed and produced it, and Victor Miller wrote the screenplay. For most of its running time the killer at Camp Crystal Lake stays out of sight.
Palmer plays Mrs. Voorhees, the camp cook, revealed in the final act as the killer. Her son, Jason, drowned at the lake in 1957 while the counselors were not watching, and she has been avenging him ever since. In this film she is only ever “Mrs. Voorhees.” The first name the franchise later gave the character, Pamela, is never spoken on screen in 1980, and it attached to her afterwards. The full story of the character lives on our Pamela Voorhees page.
Why did a star of live drama and morning television say yes? The car, and the money. Her Mercedes had died, she needed about $10,000 to replace it, and the part paid $1,000 a day for ten days on set, which comes to exactly $10,000. She bought the Scirocco.
Her first reaction to the pages was not encouraging. She later recalled her verdict: “What a piece of sh-t! Nobody is ever going to see this thing.” By her own account in David Grove’s book Making Friday the 13th (2005), she could not understand why anyone wanted her for a horror film at all. She read it as casting against everything the public knew of her, and that was exactly the point. The sunny face from morning TV and the game shows was the last person an audience would suspect.
She was not the first name on the list, either. According to Grove’s book, Estelle Parsons was the first choice, and Shelley Winters and Dorothy Malone were also offered the part. The role came round to the actress best known for smiling on a quiz panel, and the film is better for it.
She was 53 when the film opened. The film grossed $39,754,601 in North America, and about $59.8 million worldwide, on a budget reported at between $550,000 and $650,000. Even at the high end of that range, the domestic take alone came to more than sixty times what the film cost.
Not every critic was amused, and one of them made it personal. Gene Siskel’s review in the Chicago Tribune, on May 12, 1980, spoiled the ending on purpose and called Cunningham “one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business.” He printed the address of Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf+Western. Then he turned to Palmer: “Betsy Palmer lives in the little town of Rowayton, Conn. I’m sure a letter to General Delivery there will get to her.” Siskel named her town, not her house.
The Razzies piled on too. At the 1st Golden Raspberry Awards, the ceremony for the films of 1980, Palmer was nominated for Worst Supporting Actress for Friday the 13th. Amy Irving won, for Honeysuckle Rose.
After Camp Crystal Lake
She did come back once. She made a brief, credited return as Mrs. Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), her only time back in the role. After that, the character appears in Friday the 13th Part III (1982) and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) in archive footage only. Palmer turned down everything else.
That includes Freddy vs. Jason (2003). She is not in it. Paula Shaw plays Mrs. Voorhees there. Palmer said in a 2004 interview that she had agreed to come back and then turned it down over a low salary offer.
She did not walk away from horror itself. She lent her voice to the title role of Bell Witch: The Movie, released in 2007, and she played Trudie Tredwell in the short film Penny Dreadful (2005). She also appears in The Fear: Resurrection.
The Later Years
Television kept her busy into the late 1990s. In 1982 she played Suzanne Becker on CBS’s daytime drama As the World Turns. From 1989 to 1990 she was a regular presence on Knots Landing as Virginia “Ginny” Bullock, the aunt of Valene Ewing, Joan Van Ark’s character.
The guest spots read like a tour of network television: The Love Boat (1982), Murder, She Wrote (1985 and 1989), Newhart (1987), the Columbo film Death Hits the Jackpot (1991), in which she played Martha Lamarr, and Just Shoot Me! (1998).
Cool Verified Facts
- Variety’s 2015 obituary got her birth name wrong, apparently borrowing from the character. It was Patricia Betsy Hrunek, as every other record agrees.
- She died on a Friday: May 29, 2015.
- She played opposite Henry Fonda twice in the 1950s, as a Navy nurse in Mister Roberts (1955) and as the widow Nona Mayfield in The Tin Star (1957).
- She received a Fantasporto career award.
- Her first Broadway credit and her last original Broadway lead came 21 years apart: Kate Wilson in The Grand Prize (1955) and Alma Winemiller in The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1976).
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
Palmer did not phone in the role she nearly turned up her nose at. According to Grove’s book, she built a private backstory for Mrs. Voorhees: Jason was born out of wedlock when she was a teenager, and her family disowned her. None of it is in the script. All of it is in the performance.
She was a good sport about the part. She came to embrace the fame, turned up at horror fan conventions, and appeared in documentaries about the Friday the 13th films. Her best line about it came in 2005, to the Newark Star-Ledger: “And here we are, 25 years later, and I get fan mail from all over the world. What do they call me? I’m ‘The Queen of the Slashers.’ I can’t believe it.” The title stuck, and she wore it happily.
She liked to tell a story about a very early game show, too. By her own recollection, as the Los Angeles Times reported it, she worked as a co-host on a CBS show called Wheel of Fortune and was “the original Vanna White.” This was not the long-running game show that began in 1975, but an earlier CBS show of the same name.
Why She Matters
Friday the 13th launched one of horror’s longest-running franchises, and its central trick depends entirely on Betsy Palmer. The film hides its killer for most of its running time, and when the reveal comes it needs an actress the audience will trust on sight, then believe completely as a grieving mother turned murderer. Palmer gave it both. The franchise that followed was built on her son, but the series begins with her, and the next few films kept bringing her back in flashback.
She also stands for something horror does well: it can rewrite an actor’s legacy overnight. The arc is the whole story in miniature. In 1980 the film brought her a Razzie nomination and a critic inviting readers to write to her about it. Twenty-five years later, the letters arriving were fan mail from all over the world, and she could hardly believe it.
For nearly thirty years before 1980 she was a bright face of live drama, Broadway and network television. For the thirty-five years after it she was the Queen of the Slashers, and she decided, with good humour, that she liked the title.