They don’t make actors like Karen Black anymore.
Sorry if that sentiment is too acutely pithy, but it’s now literally true. Karen Black died Wednesday, due to complications from cancer. She was 74.
Black leaves behind a rich, wildly diverse cinematic legacy.
Appearing in over 100 films, Black emerged as part of the New Hollywood cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s. She co-starred in Easy Rider, Nashville, Drive, He Said, The Day Of The Locust and, most notably, Five Easy Pieces, for which she netted an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
She was simultaneously a mainstay of American genre and cult cinema of the era, popping up in Capricorn One, Killer Fish, Airport 1975, Burnt Offerings and the weirdo bilingual Canadian cop thriller Pyx (basically the original Bon Cop, Bad Cop).
She was a fixture, Karen Black, fading in and out of obscurity, eventually recuperated by Rob Zombie in his arch-genre movie sendup House Of 1000 Corpses. She’s been in just about every kind of movie. She was even in Alfred Hitchcock’s last movie, appearing opposite Drive, He Said co-star Bruce Dern in The Family Plot.
Black was able to invest serious dramas with a level of everyman (or everywoman, or everyperson) pathos. This was especially true in Five Easy Pieces, where she played an aspiring country singer waitress, a character whose down-to-earth earnestness was exploited by Jack Nicholson’s slumming, wannabe blue collar rich kid. She played a similar character in Robert Altman’s Nashville – a dolled-up country singer of questionable talent, drawing her power from her font of good intentions.
In both films, her character was disabused by the cruelty of the world around her: the cruelty of a fickle music scene, the cruelty of fickle men. But the joke was never on Black. Solemn, aww shucks sweet, even kind of goofy looking with her wide, wandering eyes, Karen Black was a vessel for the viewer’s sympathies in a cinema defined by its caustic cynicism. As a performer in these particular films, she served as a kind of reverse voodoo-doll: sadly affectless, defeated, and receptive to all our sadness, as much an object of pity as a beacon of redemption, a bastion of sensitivity in a callous world.
I met Karen Black, for a minute, in 2009. Not in Hollywood or New York or at a film festival or anything fancy or reputable. I met her at Suspect Video in Mirvish Village, a place where you can rent bootlegs of slasher flicks and arthouse stuff and (allegedly) a video of Chuck Berry pissing on a prostitute. There, at Suspect, for an hour between six and seven p.m. on a July evening, Black signed Nashville and Trilogy Of Terror DVDs. Next to nobody was there.
Still, Black was kind and generous with her time, totally engaged with the fans who always appreciated her strangely tender performances, who knew her as more than a familiar face, who knew her as Karen Black. She signed my Nashville DVD. I lost it in a move, and have since replaced it with another Nashville DVD, unsigned by Karen Black. My autograph is gone. But the actress’s signature remains, scrawled across whole broad swaths of differently engaging American cinema, from the artful to the provocative to the out-and-out cheesy.
