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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre character
Luda May Hewitt
Gender:	Female
Race	Caucasian
Location	Texas
Enemies	Everyone but her family in general, but particularly the types of teenagers who were cruel to her son.
Portrayed by:	Marietta Marich

Luda May Hewitt was a character from the 2003 remake of the 1974 classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its prequel The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. She is portrayed by Marietta Marich. In the prequel the spelling of her name was changed to Luda Mae for unknown reasons.

Luda May Hewitt is the matriatch of the Hewitt family and the mother of Sheriff Hoyt. She found the young baby that would later become Leatherface abandoned in a dumpster, and took him in to raise him, naming him Thomas.

Luda May runs a local butcher shop in Texas and is the first member of Leatherface's family that the teenagers meet in the first film. Unlike in the original 1974 film, in which Leatherface's family was somewhat abusive to him, Luda May has a fierce love for her son. Part of her hatred towards the teenagers is due to the abuse that her deformed, mentally retarded son suffered as a child at the hands of bullies.

On the commentary for the DVD release the writers revealed a cut plotline that, prior to the prequel's continuity, involved Leatherface's abusive father locking him in a woodshack for three years. Once her husband died, Luda May vowed that she had stood by long enough and decided to look after her son and take responsibility for his shortcomings.

Says Marich, "Luda Mae is the matriarch of what I like to call the 'killer brood'. I always make up a personal history of characters I play, so I suspect that Luda Mae was a homeless young woman who had to make her own way during the Depression. When she finds Thomas, she takes him home, even though he's disfigured and hideously ugly, and protects him as much as possible from the cruel people he encounters and the world at large. That's her main purpose, and the only reason Luda Mae sticks around."[1]

In the prequel, she, with the rest of the Hewitt family, are discovered to be cannibals, something that was only implied in the first film.