Karen Black

At 74 years old, Karen Black has this physical status:

Karen Blanche Black (née Ziegler, 1939-2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, and songwriter.

She rose to fame in 1970s independent films, often depicting eccentric and offbeat characters, and she established herself as a face of New Hollywood.

Her career spanned more than 50 years, with over 200 credits in both independent and mainstream films.

Black has received numerous accolades throughout her career, including two Golden Globe Awards and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Black, a native of suburban Chicago, studied theater at Northwestern University before dropping out and relocating to New York City.

She appeared on Broadway in 1965 before making her major film debut in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now (1966).

In Dennis Hopper's road film Easy Rider (1969), Black relocated to California and was depicted as an acid-tripping prostitute.

This gave rise to a lead in the film Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which she starred as a hopeless waitress and was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Black appeared in Airport 1975 (1974), her first major commercial film, and her second Golden Globe Runners Award for Best Supporting Actress went to Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby (1974). Black appeared in Robert Altman's ensemble musical drama Nashville (1975), as well as writing and performing two songs for the soundtrack, which received a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack.

In John Schlesinger's morbid drama The Day of the Locust (also 1975) she received her third Golden Globe nomination, this time for Best Actress.

She appeared in three roles in Dan Curtis' anthology horror film Trilogy of Terror (1975), and Curtis' supernatural horror film Burnt Offerings (1976).

In Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot, the same year she appeared as a con artist. Black appeared as a trans woman in Robert Altman's debut Broadway thriller Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, a role she reprised in Altman's subsequent film adaptation.

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? She appeared in the comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983), Tobe Hooper's remake of Invaders from Mars (1986), and Mars' (1986).

Black appeared in a number of arthouse, independent, and horror films in the late 1980s and 1990s, as well as producing her own screenplays.

She played a leading role as a villainous mother in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003), which established her as a cult horror icon.

She continued to appear in low-profile films in the early 2000s, as well as acting as a playwright before her death of ampullary cancer in 2013.

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Life and career

Karen Blanche Ziegler was born in Park Ridge, Illinois, the daughter of Elsie Mary (née Reif), a writer of several award-winning children's books, and Norman Arthur Ziegler, an engineer and businessman. Arthur Charles Ziegler, a classical conductor and first violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, was her paternal grandfather. She had two siblings: a sister and a brother. Gail Brown, the elder sister of Black's blackfaced, was an actor. Black was of German, Czech, and Norwegian descent. The Zieglers arrived from Southern Germany from the region of Neukirch (Rottweil) between the Black Forest and the Swabian Jura.

Black and her siblings were raised on 224 N. Greenwood Ave in Park Ridge, and she spent time on her uncle's farm near Green Bay, Wisconsin, where she often spent time on her uncle's farm. As a young child, she aspired to be a stage actress and was looking for summer stock theater work. "I'd rush out on holidays to find jobs in summer stock from the age of 13." Black said. "I started by sweeping toilets and by the time I was 16 years old, I was a prop-girl and singing on the chorus line, and I'd get my first real acting job." In 1957, Black graduated from Maine Township High School East. She enrolled at Northwestern University, where she majored in theatre arts, after high school, studying under Alvina Krause. Black completed two years of study before giving up. She later spoke out about her work with a sarcastic accent, stating: "She later reflected on her experience, which she said: '

Diane, Black's niece from her time with Robert Benedetti, gave birth while attending college at the age 19 level. Black gave the baby up for adoption at birth, but she did reconnect with her in the latter years of her life.

Black moved to New York City in 1960 to pursue an acting career, staying in a cold water apartment in Manhattan. She worked as a secretary, a front desk employee at a hotel, and an insurance company, and lived on "thirty dollars a week." Black began performing with the Rockefeller Players, a Westwood theater company. She enrolled briefly at Actors Studio but left right after enrolling: "How can a man who isn't an actor tell you how to act?" She married Charles Black, her first husband, this year, but the relationship was short-lived and ended within the year. Nonetheless, she kept his surname under control of whom she would be credited throughout her career.

Black made her screen debut in the 1960 film The Prime Time (1960), which she later described as "the worst film ever made." Black returned to theater after being disillusioned by this foray into film. She appeared as an understudy in the Broadway revival of Taking Her, She's Mine in December 1961 under director George Abbott. She made her formal appearance in The Playroom in 1965, which attracted raves and was nominated for the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.

She returned to film in 1966 in the comedy You're a Big Boy Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, portraying a young male student's passions. Black received raves for the film, and the training inspired her to relocate to Los Angeles. She appeared in various television shows, including The F.B.I., Run for Your Life, The Big Valley, The Invaders, Mannix, and Adam-12.

In the classic counterculture film Easy Rider, her film career flourished in 1969, with her playing the role of an acid-tripping prostitute opposite Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda. The sequence in the film was cut from Fonda and Hopper's 16 hours of footage. In the film Five Easy Pieces (1970), Black was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and received her first Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has also been named in the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film.

In Born to Win (1971), opposite George Segal and Robert De Niro, Black played a promiscuous faculty wife; and the Western A Gun fight, opposite Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash, in which she portrayed a saloon barmaid. Black appeared in Cisco Pike (1972) opposite Kris Kristofferson and Gene Hackman, and later appeared in Portnoy's Complaint (1972). She appeared in The Pyx (1973), a Canadian-produced horror film, playing a prostitute embroiled in a string of occult murders, and then appeared in The Outfit (1973) with Robert Duvall. In the 1975 film Little Laura and Big John, Laura Black played a runaway moll of the Ashley gang, a film that "matched" Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Black married actor Robert Burton married in Los Angeles in April 1973, but the couple divorced the following year in 1974. She appeared in the comedy Rhinoceros (1974) with Gene Wilder just shy of being born.

Airport 1975 (1974), Black's first big commercial film, in which she played Nancy Pryor, a stewardess who was forced to fly a plane following a midair collision. In the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, she portrayed an unfaithful wife, Myrtle Wilson, earning her her second Golden Globe Award in the same category. Several actresses appeared in Dan Curtis' televised anthology film Trilogy of Terror (1975): She was a plain college professor, a pair of sisters who squabbled over their father's inheritance ("Millicent and Therese"), and the unknowing owner of a sarcastic Zuni fetish who longs for her ("Amelia"), but the women in the film were described later ("Amelia"

In John Schlesinger's tragic drama In 1930s Hollywood's tragic romance In a teen starlet's The Day of the Locust (1975), Black received her third Golden Globe Award for Best Actress for her role as an aspiring actress in 1930s Hollywood. Though the film received her critical notice, Black recalled that the process was terribly flawed and could possibly hinder her career:

In Robert Altman's ensemble film Nashville, she starred as a glamorous country singer. Black wrote and performed two songs for the soundtrack, which was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack in addition to acting in the film. On July 4, 1975, Black actor and screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson born Hunter, his son.

In 1976, Black appeared in Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock's last film. Black "does a good job in a job that doesn't give her much to do," Roger Ebert wrote mixed reviews. In the supernatural horror film Burnt Offerings, she and director Dan Curtis co-star Oliver Reed and Bette Davis, playing the widow of a family living in a haunted house. Burnt Offerings was dubbed a "outstanding terror film" in The New York Times in the fall of 1976, despite "solid actors." In addition, she appeared in Crime and Passion (1976), co-starring Omar Sharif.

In September 1976, Black went to Toronto to be a guest star on the famous variety show The Bobby Vinton Show, which aired around the United States and Canada. Black performed "Looking Now" and joined Bobby in a medley of country oldies. Mrs. Oliver's 1978-1978) opposite Elliott Gould appeared in two separate films in the 1977 made-for-television drama The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver. Black appeared in the tense drama In Praise of Older Women in 1979, portraying a middle-aged woman with a 17-year-old boy.

In 1980, Black and his partner Carson were divorced. This year, she appeared in a made-for-TV film Poli Story: Confessions of a Lady Cop. Black later starred in the drama Killing Heat (1981), based on Doris Lessing's 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing, which concentrated on race relations in South Africa in the 1960s; in the film, she portrayed an urban woman who relocated to a rural farm with her husband. In the French film Chanel Solitaire (1981), a biographical film tracing Coco Chanel's early life, she also appeared as Émilienne d'Alençon (1981).

In 1982, Black appeared alongside Cher and Sandy Dennis in a Robert Altman-directed Broadway production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, and Dean. Cher and Dennis appeared in Altman's film version, which was also released in 1982. In both versions, she portrayed Joanne, a trans woman in a small Texas town. Black spent months researching transgender people and how they don't always seem to be satisfied, and that he did a good job with "real depressing results" about people who've become transsexuals and how they don't seem fully portrayed. I needed to become a man, but not a man. And, since the process was so painful to me, I might use the agony of my actual transition for Joanne. Although Black's performance garnered some critical praise, Gary Arnold of The Washington Post praised Black's role in the film, saying that "watching her in the film, you'll know that what she's doing as Joanna [sic] will be both witty and credible."

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? black next appeared in Henry Jaglom-directed comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983) playing a divorcee who becomes involved with a bachelor, followed by a lead in the teen-themed black comedy Bad Manners (1984). Sheila Sheinfeld played in television during this period, as well as a guest-starring role on E/R between 1984 and 1985. She appeared in several feature films in 1985, including the Italian exploitation horror film Cut and Run directed by Ruggero Deodato; the Canadian supernatural horror film The Blue Man; and the action film Savage Dawn, co-starring Lance Henriksen as a kidnappee.

In 1986, Black co-starred with her son, Hunter, in Tobe Hooper's science fiction horror film Invaders from Mars. On September 27, 1987, she married Stephen Eckelberry, her fourth husband, with whom she adopted Celine, a daughter. In Larry Cohen's horror film It's Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987), she appeared as a mutant's mother and in the youth-themed comedy The Invisible Child (1988). In Homer and Eddie (1989), a comedy about a woman (Goldberg) with a psychologically inflammatory brain tumor and a mentally impaired man (Belushi), she co-starred with Jim Belushi and Whoopi Goldberg. In 1990, Black appeared in The Children (1990), a British adaptation of a book by Edith Wharton, opposite Ben Kingsley, and in the science fiction film Zapped Again!

Black was more commonly cast in horror films early in the 1990s. Mirror, Mirror (1990), in which she played a struggling mother; Gary Graver's low-budget supernatural film Evil Spirits (1990); and Children of the Night (1991), in which she played an ancient vampire. She appeared in Rubin and Ed (1991), the martial arts film The Roller Blade Seven (also 1991), and a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player (1992). Black resurfaced in The Roller Blade Seven's 1992 and 1993 sequels, as well as in the direct-to-video comedy The Double 0 Kid (1993), starring Corey Haim and Nicole Eggert. Black appeared in George Sluizer's drama Dark Blood, opposite River Phoenix and Judy Davis, a film that remained incomplete and unreleased for two decades after Phoenix died during its production. Plan 10 from Outer Space, a science fiction satire of Mormon theology starring Trent Harris in 1995, appeared in Plan 10 from Outer Space, a science fiction satire of Mormon theology directed by Trent Harris.

In 1996, Black appeared in Child of the Corn IV: The Gathering, opposite Naomi Watts. She appeared in a variety of other independent films this year, including as a public defender in Ulli Lommel's drama Every Minute is Goodbye and the exploitation comedy Dinosaur Valley Girls. Lady Byron co-starred in the feminist science fiction film Conceiving Ada (1997), about a modern scientist who uses software to connect with Victorian computer programming pioneer Ada Lovelace, the niece of poet Lord Byron. She appeared in various television shows including Men and as a actress in George Hickenlooper's Dogtown, as a singer in rural Missouri.

She appeared in a number of independent films in 1998, including the camp comedy I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, the comedy Charades, as well as Dr. MacGuffin's short film Waiting. Black began filming Rob Zombie's directorial debut House of 1000 Corpses in 2000, in which she played Mother Firefly, the matron of a family of psychotic murderers. The film received largely unfavorable feedback upon its debut in 2003, but it helped solidify Black's place as a cult icon in the horror genre.

Black received the Best Actress Award at the Fantasporto International Film Festival in Porto, Portugal, for her role in the critically acclaimed Steve Balderson film Firecracker (2005), in which she appeared in two parts, Sandra and Eleanor. Both actress and singer John Hurt were also recognized with Career Achievement Awards.

With the opening of Missouri Waltz at the Blank Theater in Los Angeles in May 2007, Black began a career as a playwright; Black also performed in the role. She has also appeared on live narrations of Guy Maddin's experimental film Brand Upon the Brain. In 2007, he was on tour around the country, performing the show for the first time.

Black co-starred Mink Stole, Pleasant Gehman, and Jane Wiedlin in April 2009, a tribute to film noir women-in-prison dramas starring Stephen Balderson, Sandra Balderson. She appeared in John Landis' 2010 thriller Some Guy Kills People, as well as Ada Ruilova's surrealist short film Meet the Eye (2009). Black appeared on Cass McCombs' song "Dreams-True-Girl" from the album Catacombs later this year.

In October 2015, Death Grips, an experimental hip-hop band, released "Bottomless Pit" on YouTube. The video features a video of Black's drummer/co-producer Zach Hill reciting lines from a film script. The video was shot in early 2013 and was shot in early 2013.

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