Cassandra Gay Peterson[1] (born September 17, 1951) is an American actress best known for her portrayal of the horror hostess character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

When she was a toddler, she was scalded by boiling water, which required skin grafts to cover over 35% of her body to heal, resulting in her having to spend three months in the hospital.

[10] Immediately after graduating high school, she drove back to Las Vegas, where she became a showgirl in Frederic Apcar's pioneering "Vive Les Girls!"

[15] In her 2021 memoir Yours Cruelly, Elvira, she writes, "Perhaps the biggest mistake I made in my twenties was posing nude for a husband-and-wife photography team, who bullshitted me into doing what they said was a 'test shoot' for Penthouse magazine.

[17][18][19][20] In 1979, she joined the Los Angeles-based improvisational troupe The Groundlings, where she created a Valley girl-type character upon whom the Elvira persona is largely based.

She and her best friend, Robert Redding, came up with the sexy goth/vampire look after producers rejected her original idea to look like Sharon Tate's character in The Fearless Vampire Killers.

The court ruled in favor of Peterson, holding that "'likeness' means actual representation of another person's appearance, and not simply close resemblance."

[33] That same year, she also was a guest commentator at Wrestlemania 2 in the Los Angeles segments alongside Jesse Ventura and Lord Alfred Hayes.

[34] From 1989 through 1991, Peterson appeared as Elvira in a series of commercials promoting World Championship Wrestling's annual Halloween Havoc pay-per-view events.

[35][36][37] After several years of attempts to make a sequel to Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Cassandra and her manager and then-husband Mark Pierson decided to finance a second movie.

With little budget left for promotion, Cassandra and Mark screened the film at AIDS charity fund raisers across America.

Since she had refused to host Make Them Die Slowly, Seven Doors of Death, and Buried Alive, however, the videos were released on the ThrillerVideo label without Elvira's appearance as hostess.

After this, several extended episodes[43] of the British namesake series Thriller (i.e., The Devil's Web, A Killer in Every Corner, Murder Motel) were also released without an appearance by Elvira; in some, such as Buried Alive, the cast replaced her.

It also starred Katherine Helmond, Phoebe Augustine, Cristine Rose, Ted Henning, Lynne Marie Stewart, Claudette Wells, John Paragon, Laurie Faso, and Basil Hoffman.

She also detailed plans for an Edward Scissorhands-inspired animated feature film revealing Elvira's origins with the holiday of Halloween.

[46] Peterson has also portrayed non-Elvira roles in many other films, most notably Pee-wee's Big Adventure in 1985 alongside friend and fellow Groundling Paul Reubens, who starred as his Pee-wee Herman character; Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, released in 1987, which starred Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone; and 2010's All About Evil, as a mother named Linda Thompson who says not to go to the old theater to watch scary movies.

[47][48] In the 1970s, Peterson had a liaison with Jon Voight as well as with Robert De Niro during the filming of The Godfather Part II.

[55] Peterson recorded several songs and skits for her Elvira Halloween albums in the 1980s and 1990s: She also performed on a track called "Zombie Killer" for the band Leslie and the LY's, released in February 2008.

The music video for the track features Leslie and the LY's performing to a sold-out audience of zombies in a fictional venue called "Elvira Stadium".