She raised four children in Kentucky and Florida. Two of them told a Virginia jury that she beat them, and the youngest, Johnny Depp, says he forgave her and thanks her for the lesson.
Johnny Depp’s mother, Betty Sue Palmer, was a waitress from eastern Kentucky who died in Los Angeles in May 2016, aged 81. When a reporter from Us magazine phoned her in 1993 for a profile of her son, she said: “I don’t do interviews! Please!” She hung up and called his agent.
She is not known to have spoken to the press again, so most of what is on record about her comes from her son. He called her “truly one of my best friends” on Inside the Actors Studio in 2002. At her funeral, he later told Rolling Stone, he called her “maybe the meanest human being I have ever met in my life”.
In an interview with The Telegraph published in July 2025, Depp was asked about being dropped from the Fantastic Beasts films in 2020. Anyone who thought they could hurt him more than he had already been hurt was “gravely mistaken”, he said, and when asked what he meant, he talked about his mother.
“She beat me with a f***ing stick, a f***ing shoe, an ashtray, a phone, it didn’t matter, man. But I thank her for that. She taught me how not to raise kids. Just do the exact opposite of what she did.”
Johnny Depp to The Telegraph, July 2025
Now 63, he returns to major studio films on 13 November as Scrooge in Paramount’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, his first since losing that role.
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A childhood in the Kentucky hills
Betty Sue Wells was born in 1935. “My mother was raised in a shack, in the wilds of Appalachia, where the toilet was an outhouse,” Depp told Rolling Stone in 2013. “She used to say she did the same things that her mom did,” he added, “and her mom certainly didn’t know any better.” By his account, she was on phenobarbital, a sedative, at 12.
She was still a teenager when her son Daniel was born in November 1953. He and a daughter, Debbie, came from a first marriage that ended when the boy was four. Her second husband, the civil engineer John Christopher Depp, adopted both children. The couple had Christi, and then Johnny, born in Owensboro, Kentucky, on 9 June 1963, when his mother was in her late twenties.
Growing up with Betty Sue in Florida
“My mom, her feet were on fire, and she had to move, so we moved constantly,” Depp told the jury at his 2022 defamation trial against his ex-wife, Amber Heard. His brother Daniel once counted 75 homes. By 1970, when Johnny was seven, the family had settled in Miramar, in south Florida, where Betty Sue waited tables in small diners.
After her shifts he would rub her feet while she counted the coins from her tips. When he was 12, she spent $25 on an electric guitar for him.
Two of her children say home was also a violent place. “She would hit us. She would throw things,” Christi Dembrowski, Depp’s older sister, testified as the trial’s first witness. In his own testimony, Depp said the abuse could come “in the form of an ashtray being flung at you”, or a beating with a high-heeled shoe or a telephone, and that the insults were “almost worse than the beatings”. His mother mocked the lazy left eye he was born with, calling him “cock eye” and “one eye”.
At a press conference in Toronto in 2015, he recalled what she told him when a boy at school picked on him at about the age of six: “Next time anybody puts their hands on you, pick up a brick and lay them out.” According to his sister, though, he never hit their mother back. Asked whether he ever did, Christi said: “He never went to that place.” She also described what the two of them decided as children.
“Both Johnny and I actually, we decided that once we left, once we had our own home, we were never going to repeat, ever, anything similar in any way to our childhood. We were gonna do it different.”
Christi Dembrowski, giving evidence on 12 April 2022
Their father never fought back either, Depp said. John Depp stood in silence while his wife “delivered the pain” until one morning in 1978, when he packed his car and left. Betty Sue came home from work at about 3.30 that afternoon, sensed something was wrong and said: “Your daddy’s gone.” Johnny, then 15, drove to his father’s workplace. “You’re the man now,” his father told him. Betty Sue, by then in her early forties, fell into a deep depression and tried to take her own life, Depp testified.
Who was Robert Palmer, Johnny Depp’s stepfather?
Betty Sue later married Robert Palmer, no relation to the English singer. By Depp’s account his stepfather spent about half his life in prison before his death around 2000, and Depp has called him “an inspiration”.
How Depp kept her close
By the late 1980s, with 21 Jump Street on television, Depp had “Betty Sue” tattooed inside a heart on his left arm. When Us magazine profiled him in 1993, its reporter noted framed photographs of her as a dark-haired young woman in his Los Angeles home. On 29 February 2004, when he was up for his first Oscar for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, she went with him to the ceremony along with his partner, Vanessa Paradis.
In 1995 he bought her a horse farm near Lexington, in Kentucky’s Bluegrass country, which became known as Betty Sue’s Family Farm. He sold it in 2001 and bought it back in 2005 for $2 million, reportedly so that she could live there. It sold for $1.35 million in 2020, four years after her death.
In 2013, he told Rolling Stone, he learned she had terminal cancer and moved her into a rented house in Los Angeles. Treatment helped for a while, and in February 2015 she attended his small wedding to Heard in the city.
How Betty Sue Palmer died
She died on the morning of Friday 20 May 2016 in Los Angeles, aged 81, after what was announced as a long illness. The family did not name the illness at the time, though her son has since said she had cancer. His children, Lily-Rose and Jack, visited her in hospital in her last days, he later told the court.
Three days after her death, Heard filed for divorce, and coverage of the split quickly overshadowed the loss. Days later Heard accused Depp of domestic abuse, which he denied. In 2020 the High Court in London ruled that The Sun’s description of him as a “wife beater” was substantially true, and in 2022 a Virginia jury found that each had defamed the other, Heard on three counts and Depp on one.
How Depp remembers her
In November 2016, less than six months after her death, Depp accepted an award from the cancer charity Rhonda’s Kiss and thanked the doctors and nurses who had treated her. “She was a hellcat,” he said. “She was mean, but she was funny.” In 2018 he told Rolling Stone: “Betty Sue, I worshiped her.” Then, as his smile faded, he added: “She could be a real b***h on wheels.”
On 20 April 2022, his second day on the stand, he told the jury: “I had made peace with Betty Sue because I understood where she came from and I understood how difficult her childhood was. I forgave her for all that.” Christi told the court that their mother had “softened” in later life.
In 2013, in the interview where he described the shack she grew up in, Depp also talked about raising his own children: “With my kids, they’re told 75 times a day that they’re loved.”
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