Karen Black

Karen Blanche Black, born Karen Blanche Ziegler on July 1, 1939, in Park Ridge, Illinois, was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter whose career spanned five decades and encompassed nearly 200 film and stage credits. She died on August 8, 2013, from ampullary cancer. Her father, Norman Arthur Ziegler, was an engineer and businessman, and her mother, Elsie Mary Ziegler, wrote prize-winning children's novels. Her paternal grandfather, Arthur Charles Ziegler, was a classical musician and first violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Black was of German, Czech, and Norwegian descent, and the Ziegler family had emigrated from Neukirch, Württemberg, Germany. She grew up with a brother and a sister, Gail Brown, at 224 N. Greenwood Ave. in Park Ridge, and the family also spent time on an uncle's farm near Green Bay, Wisconsin.

From the age of thirteen, Black pursued summer stock theater work during school vacations, beginning by cleaning toilets and eventually working as a prop girl and chorus performer before landing her first paid acting role at seventeen. She attended Maine East High School for her freshman year and part of her sophomore year, then continued at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Indiana, and spent one year at Purdue University before transferring to Northwestern University, where she majored in theatre arts under instructor Alvina Krause. She completed two years at Northwestern before dropping out and relocating to New York City in 1960, where she took jobs as a secretary, hotel front desk worker, and insurance office employee while beginning her stage career with the Rockefeller Players, a theater troupe in Westwood, New Jersey.

Black made a minor screen appearance in the independent film The Prime Time in 1960, an experience she later described unfavorably, before returning her focus to theater. She worked as an understudy in the Broadway production of Take Her, She's Mine in December 1961 under director George Abbott. Her formal Broadway debut came in 1965 with The Playroom, which earned favorable reviews and brought her a nomination for a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress. The following year, she appeared alongside José Ferrer in a stage production of After the Fall at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, earning an Angel Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Her major film career began with a leading role in Francis Ford Coppola's comedy You're a Big Boy Now in 1966, after which she relocated to Los Angeles. Starting in 1967, she appeared in guest roles on television series including The F.B.I., Run for Your Life, The Big Valley, Mannix, and Adam-12. In 1969, she played an acid-tripping prostitute opposite Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, a role that had originally been offered to Lana Wood. The following year, her portrayal of Rayette, a waitress and the girlfriend of Jack Nicholson's character in Five Easy Pieces, earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Black continued building her film career through the early 1970s with roles in Born to Win opposite George Segal and Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson's directorial debut Drive He Said, the Western A Gunfight opposite Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash, Cisco Pike opposite Kris Kristofferson and Gene Hackman, and additional productions throughout the decade. Her first major commercial picture was the disaster film Airport 1975 in 1974, and that same year her portrayal of Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby earned her a second Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. In 1975, she played a glamorous country singer in Robert Altman's Nashville, writing and performing two songs for the soundtrack, work that brought her a Grammy Award nomination. Also in 1975, her performance as an aspiring actress in John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust earned her a third Golden Globe nomination, this time for Best Actress. That year she also took on four roles in Dan Curtis's anthology horror film Trilogy of Terror, and in 1976 she appeared in Curtis's Burnt Offerings and played a kidnapping accomplice in Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot.

Black's Broadway appearances, which spanned from 1961 to 1982, included The Playroom, the comedy Happily Ever After, and Keep It in the Family, in addition to her 1982 appearance in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, directed by Robert Altman, in which she played a transsexual character. She subsequently reprised that role in Altman's film adaptation of the same production. Her later film work included a starring role in the comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie in 1983, a part in Tobe Hooper's remake of Invaders from Mars in 1986, and a leading role as a villainous mother in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses in 2003. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s she appeared in arthouse, independent, and horror films while also writing her own screenplays and working as a playwright. She continued acting in low-profile films into the early 2010s until her death in 2013.