Actress Betsy Palmer, probably best known to horror movie fans as the mother to legendary film character Jason Voorhees, has passed away at age 88. Palmer passed away of natural causes in a hospice center in Danbury, Connecticut.
Palmer leaves us with 60 credits in TV and film as well as a slew of talk and game show appearances for us to remember her by. A television veteran, her career spanned 56 years, with regular appearances on such popular shows as I’ve Got a Secret, Murder, She Wrote and Knots Landing. But to horror fans her most memorable role would be that of Pamela Voorhees, the original killer of the popular franchise Friday the 13th, a role she admittedly only took because she was in need of a new car.
Palmer said in response to her first read through of the script, “What a piece of shit! Nobody is ever going to see this thing. What an awful thing this is.”
Still, Palmer would later look at horror classic as an opportunity to change her squeaky clean image.
“The image always was of me was that I was this girl next door, and of course I’ve always said that there wasn’t a gal that ever lived next door to me that I wanted to be like,” she would say, “I was always trying to prove that I wasn’t the girl next door.”
She is survived by her daughter according to her manager.
