![]() She won a devoted following for her tour-de-force performances in the 1975 horror-Īnthology TV movie “Trilogy of Terror,” based on stories by Richard Matheson. Hitchcock, you mean keenly perceptive.’ And he’d get all deflated because he’d lost his own game.” Black, has been most perspicacious,’ hoping to catch me up. “He would say, for example, ‘Your work today, Ms. “He found out that I had a good vocabulary, so he would try to catch me not knowing the meaning of a word,” she told the New York Observer. She starred as a kidnapper in Alfred Hitchcock’s last feature, “Family Plot” (1976), and said she and the director established a playful rapport. ![]() She wrote and recorded several songs for the movie, including “Memphis.” The film, set in the country-music capital, featured Ms. She received some of the best reviews in “Nashville” (1975), director Robert Altman’s ambitious, Oscar-nominated drama that followed more than 20 major characters and was steeped in the paranoia of the Watergate and Vietnam era. Black was mindful of her typecasting as women of easy virtue, and she tried to break away in mainstream disaster fare as the flight attendant who tries to land a plane in “Airport 1975” and in small-budget art films such as the 1974 adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist farce “Rhinoceros.” The next year, she was the sexually teasing starlet Faye Greener in “The Day of the Locust,” based on Nathanael West’s apocalyptic story of 1930s Hollywood. The film was lavishly budgeted and picturesque but almost universally lambasted as a cinematic deadweight. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” which starred Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. She was the crass and adulterous Myrtle Wilson in the 1974 screen version of F. They included the randy faculty wife in “Drive, He Said” (1971), which marked Nicholson’s directing debut, and the promiscuous “Monkey” in “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), starring Richard Benjamin in a poorly received adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel. Black was less than discriminating in the roles she accepted and played a variety of idiosyncratic love interests. Hearted, if dim, short-order waitress impregnated by Nicholson’s self-hating wanderer, she earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Black opposite him in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970). Nicholson, whose career zoomed after his brief turn as a societal dropout in “Easy Rider,” urged director Bob Rafelson to cast Ms. Black once told an interviewer that younger audiences simply “wanted to see people throwing up, smoking grass.” The film was meant to evoke the 1960s counterculture and was a riposte to bloated musicals and arch dramas and comedies that failed to connect with American youth at a time of deep social unrest. Black and the biker antiheroes (Hopper and Peter Fonda) drop LSD in a New Orleans cemetery to hallucinogenic imagery and pulsating rock music. Black appeared in “Easy Rider” (1969), the low-budget but ambitious biker movie directed and co-written by Dennis Hopper that exploded commercially. Her background was Chicago bourgeois, but she rebelled by quitting high school to marry for the first of four times. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors.” Black was one of the busiest leading actresses in Hollywood, propelled by what Time magazine once described as her “freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness.Īctress Karen Black as Rayette Dipesto in “Five Easy Pieces,” directed by Bob Rafelson in 1970. She brought surprising depth of empathy and vulnerability to a range of not-very-bright characters. You tell her where it’s at and she grabs it.” Jack Nicholson once called her “the most lucid actress I’ve ever worked with. She nearly and almost single-handedly brought an X rating to one early film role. She had close-set eyes that could appear crossed from certain camera angles and possessed an intense sexual charisma that gave her an alarmingly unpredictable screen persona. Black, who appeared in nearly 200 film and television roles, projected an unconventional allure. Black was diagnosed with the rare disease in 2010 and this year raised tens of thousands of dollars for experimental treatment through a crowdsourcing Web site. The cause was ampullary cancer, her husband, Stephen Eckelberry, told the Associated Press. Karen Black, an actress whose role as the acid-tripping prostitute in the movie “Easy Rider” launched her career as one of the emblematic tramps, vamps, kooks and down-and-outers of 1970s cinema, notably in “Five Easy Pieces,” “Nashville” and “The Great Gatsby,” died Aug.
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