Lorna Raver obit

Lorna Raver, Actress in ‘Drag Me to Hell,’ Dies at 81

The stage and audiobook veteran also appeared on ‘The Young and the Restless’ and on three TV series for David E. Kelley.

 She was not on the list.

Lorna Raver, who chillingly portrayed the elderly woman who plants a curse on Allison Lohman’s bank executive to set the horror in motion in the Sam Raimi-directed Drag Me to Hell, has died. She was 81.

Raver’s death on May 12 was revealed in the “In Memoriam” section of SAG-AFTRA’s Summer 2025 magazine edition.

On television, the stage-trained Raver took over for Millie Perkins to play the concentration camp survivor Rebecca Kaplan (and mother of Brad Carlton) who comes out of hiding on the CBS soap The Young and the Restless from 2006-07.

After two Evil Dead movies and three Spider-Man films, Raimi returned to horror by co-writing and directing Drag Me to Hell (2009). The Universal film premiered at Cannes and was a critical and commercial hit, grossing $90.8 million worldwide on a budget of about $30 million.

In Jason Norman’s 2014 book, Welcome to Our Nightmares: Behind the Scene With Today’s Horror Actors, Raver said she had no idea what the movie was about when she auditioned for the part of Mrs. Slyvia Ganush.

“While I knew of [Raimi’s] work from other films, I was so ignorant of the whole horror genre that I had never even heard of the Evil Dead [movies],” she said. “I was definitely interested in doing it because of Sam Raimi, but I was not fully aware of exactly what I was getting into until it happened.”

When Lohman’s Christine Brown “shames” a begging Mrs. Ganush by refusing to extend her mortgage, the two battle in a dark, underground parking lot before the old lady rips a button off Christine’s jacket, puts a curse on it and gives it back to her. “Soon it will be you who comes begging to me,” she says.

“What I liked about the character,” Raver said, “was that she was powerful.”

Born on Oct. 9, 1943, in York, Pennsylvania, Lorna Raver Johnson got early acting experience at the Hedgerow Theater outside Philadelphia. She moved to New York and in 1979 portrayed the owner of the restaurant in the off-Broadway debut of Robin Swicord’s Last Days of the Dixie Girl Café.

In 1980, she appeared in the premiere of Matt Williams’ Between Daylight and Boonville, also off-Broadway, then worked in Chicago before coming to Los Angeles to continue her stage career. She made her onscreen debut as the secretary of Dana Carvey’s character in Donald Petrie’s Opportunity Knocks (1990).

With The Young and the Restless in 1997, she played Cape Cod resident Helen Miller.

For David E. Kelley, she appeared in the 1997 pilot of The Practice and played judges in Ally McBeal and Boston Legal.

She also showed up on episodes of ER, Saved by the Bell: The New Class, Beverly Hills, 90210, Felicity, Judging Amy, Star Trek: Voyager, Gilmore Girls, Charmed, First Watch, NYPD Blue, Cold Case, Desperate Housewives, Weeds, Nip/Tuck, Bones and Grey’s Anatomy and in the films Freeway (1996) and Armored (2009).

She received numerous Earphones Awards for her work in audiobooks.

Her partner of 25 years, Yuri Rasovsky, a Peabody Award winner for his work as a writer, producer and director for radio and a Grammy nominee, died at age 67 in January 2012.

 

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