Lorna Raver, ‘Drag Me to Hell’ star, dead at 81

Lorna Raver, the actress best known for her role in director Sam Raimi’s 2009 horror film “Drag Me to Hell,” has passed away. She was 81.

Although Raver died on May 12, the news of her passing was not revealed until it was included alongside Anne Burrell, George Wendt and Brian Wilson in the “In Memoriam” section of SAG-AFTRA’s Summer 2025 magazine edition published Monday, Aug. 11.

No other details were immediately available, and Raver’s cause of death has not been disclosed.

Michael Greene, Raver’s rep, remembered the late actress in a touching tribute to The Post following the news of her passing.

“She will go to Heaven, not dragged to Hell,” Green said of the “Drag Me to Hell” star. “She was an incredible lady and artist. A true chameleon, the complete opposite of this character in real life.”

Born in York, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 9, 1943, Raver began acting at the Hedgerow Theater outside Philadelphia, per The Hollywood Reporter.

She later moved to New York and went on to star in Robin Swicord’s off-Broadway play “Last Days of the Dixie Girl Café” in 1979. One year later, Raver appeared in Matt Williams’ “Between Daylight and Boonville.”

She then moved to Chicago before settling in Los Angeles, and Raver’s big-screen debut came in 1990 when she was cast as the secretary of Dana Carvey’s character in Donald Petrie’s “Opportunity Knocks.”

She later teamed up with Raimi in 2009 to portray Mrs. Sylvia Ganush in the horror director’s “Drag Me to Hell” alongside Alison Lohman and Justin Long.

“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,’” Raver recalled in Jason Norman’s 2014 book, “Welcome to Our Nightmares: Behind the Scene With Today’s Horror Actors.”

“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,” she added.

Besides “Opportunity Knocks” and “Drag Me to Hell,” Raver had more than 50 TV credits to her name.

She portrayed Helen Miller in the soap opera hit “The Young and the Restless” in 1997, and later returned to the soap from 2006 to 2007 to play Rebecca Kaplan.

Raver also appeared in the 1997 pilot of “The Practice” and played judges in both “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal.”