Karen Black, 1939-2013: a ravenous appetite for pretending | Features | Roger Ebert (2024)

Thereare 194 credits on Karen Black’s IMDb page, and her first credit reads,“Betty—Painted Woman” in a 1959 film called ThePrime Time. The synopsis says: “A bored young girl looking for excitementgets involved with nude modeling, drugs and a rock band.” Black was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in 1939 insuburban Chicago (her mother wrote popular children’s books), so she would havebeen twenty years old in her film debut. I haven’t seen The Prime Time, and it doesn’t look like Black played this boredyoung girl herself, but she was not the heroine type of that time, and she wasprobably more comfortable then as an extra on the edge. She would need to waituntil the late 1960s before she began her run of outstanding films, a run thatwent all through the 1970s. If that period in American film was storied andliberated and golden, it might be said that Black was the “what the hell?”emblem of the American New Wave, its most extreme, improvisational player, itsmost unusual, unaccountable, unstable presence.

Throughmost of the 1960s, Black worked in the freewheeling Off-Broadway scene in NewYork, and that’s worth remembering if we’re trying to come to grips with hergritty malleability, her willingness to try things most actresses wouldn’t haveever been asked to do, her hammy outrageousness. She was just a girlfriend inFrancis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big BoyNow (1966), but already she was signaling to the camera in that movie thatshe was up for more challenging things.

MostBaby Boomers remember Black for her horror anthology TV film Trilogy of Terror (1975), where she ripsinto several roles but is most memorably beset in one episode by a Zuni fetishdoll that chases her from room to room. Again, as in Airport 1975, Black goes so all-out with such a ridiculoussituation that the result is campy, funny, and genuinely scary all at once.People remembering the original airing always laugh about it, but you can tellthat they were also seriously creeped out by the idea of this vicious littlekiller doll stabbing all around Black’s legs.

Blackcame to grief on the set of John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1975), a large, coarse adaptation ofNathanael West’s anti-Hollywood novel. “I wish I hadn’t done it,” she saidlater in life. “It’s hard to take gossip when you’re not used to it, and Iwasn’t.” The seven-month shoot was an ordeal for her, and the film does not doher or West or anyone else justice. But in the same year, Black got to be oneof the country singers in Robert Altman’s masterpiece Nashville (1975), and Altman’s camera was sensitively attuned toher every soft-grained mood and gesture.

Atthis point, Black’s friend Henry Jaglom offered her a vehicle and a kind ofvalentine, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?(1983), a charming movie that showed the light colors in Black’s palette. Afterthat, unfortunately, her career was filled with credits but very muchtouch-and-go. Her films of the last thirty years were the kinds of things you’dcatch on late night cable or in the back of dusty video stores, with luridtitles and even more lurid plots swirling around Black’s indefatigable “Whynot?” presence. Her only real respite was a double-header opposite a verydifferent indie goddess, Tilda Swinton, in ConceivingAda (1997) and Tecknolust (2002),where she was billed as “Dirty Dick.”

Blackmade her own opportunities off screen, often traveling with a one-woman showwhere she would play all the characters she wanted to play: singers, old women,men, animals. Everything and everyone was fair game when it came to herravenous appetite for pretending. When she was diagnosed with cancer, Blackfought back fiercely, using all of her savings andtraveling for new treatments and never giving up because she loved life somuch, and because she loved to act so much. A true original, Black wanted toplay with us in her own private dramatic funhouse, and she wanted all theattention in the world, and for a brief, crazy period all the attention in theworld was hers, and she relished her spotlight as vividly and amusingly anddisturbingly as anyone on screen ever has.