Betsy Palmer has often been called the ‘All American Girl’ and yet few know that she was actually born Patricia Betsy Hrunek, daughter of Rudolph Vincent Hrunek, an industrial chemist who was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia and Marie Love, who launched the Chicago Business College.
Betsy Palmer at age 7.
Betsy was a 1944 graduate of East Chicago Roosevelt High School and a graduate from the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University, (now, The Theatre School at DePaul University) where she studied theater.
Originally, she worked as a stenographer and secretary for the B&O Railroad. Later she confessed that she hated it because she was shut off from people.
Through her long lasting career, she appeared in numerous TV shows dating to the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. Among them were such classic dramas as Kraft Theatre, Playhouse 90 and Studio One.
Betsy was active on Broadway, in television and in film.
Her film credits included Mr. Roberts with Henry Fonda, The Long Gray Line with Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara, Queen Bee with Joan Crawford, and The Tin Star with Fonda and Anthony Perkins.
Television credits included Knot’s Landing, The Love Boat, Newhart, Just Shoot Me and Murder, She Wrote.
Her Broadway plays, included Same Time, Next Year, South Pacific, What Every Woman Knows, Roar Like A Dove, Cactus Flower, and The Eccentricities of a Nightingale.
But perhaps her most famous role, and one coming from a script she called ‘shit’, was when she portrayed Pamela Voorhees, Jason Voorhees’ mother, in the popular slasher film Friday the 13th.
