Adrienne King
Adrienne King was a working child actor long before she was a horror icon. Her mother placed her in commercials when she was six months old, and her first screen credit is the 1965 television film of Inherit the Wind. Through the late 1970s she turns up in New York productions with no name attached to the part: uncredited in Between the Lines, uncredited on the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever, and in Hair.
Friday the 13th changed that in 1980. She plays Alice, the camp counsellor the film follows, and the performance is better than the film's reputation suggests. There is very little acting for the back row in it. The fear works because she keeps everything so ordinary right up to the point where it stops being ordinary, and she returned as Alice for Friday the 13th Part 2.
Then she largely stopped, and the later credits here are sparse: an appearance as herself in the retrospective documentary His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th, and Rachel in The Butterfly Room in 2012. Alongside the acting she has worked as a visual artist and a winemaker, which is a more interesting second act than the horror circuit usually produces.
Movies (7)
Where to start with Adrienne King
Friday the 13th is unavoidable and also genuinely worth watching, not because it frightens anybody now but because it is a lean, cheap, competently made piece of 1980 filmmaking, and King's Alice holds the middle of it with very little help from the script.
Friday the 13th Part 2 is the follow-up, and the two are best taken together for the shape of the thing, though the sequel belongs largely to somebody else.
His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th is the documentary to reach for afterwards, with King among the people discussing the series from the inside. The Butterfly Room is the obscure late one, an odd little horror picture, and Saturday Night Fever is a spot-the-face exercise, since she is an uncredited dancer in it.