By Lee Pfeiffer
Cinema Retro is very saddened to learn the news that Karen Black has died at age 74 following a long battle with cancer that was documented on web sites by her husband Stephen Eckelberry. Black found that her insurance plans would not cover some of the experimental treatments she had hoped to try and planned to travel to Europe where they could be administered. Drained of her savings by the cost of health care treatments, Black and her husband made appeals for financial donations on the web in hopes of raising enough money to get to Europe. Sadly, she became completely incapacitated before that could happen. Eckelberry had documented the last three years of Black's life as part of a documentary about her battle with cancer that will be shown in some format in the future. Black first gained attention in a Broadway show in 1965 before gaining fame on film in counter-culture movies of the late 1960s and 1970s including Easy Rider, Drive, He Said and Five Easy Pieces, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She worked very steadily in films, TV and on stage. Until her illness struck, she had been performing acclaimed one-woman shows in which she would sing and recount amazing stories about her show business career. She also appeared in many other high profile films such as Alfred Hitchcock's last movie Family Plot and Airport '75, a kitschy boxoffice hit in which she played a stewardess who must take command of a plane when the pilots are disabled. She also appeared in Portnoy's Complaint, The Outfit, The Great Gatsby, Capricorn One and Robert Altman's Nashville.
On a personal note, I only met Karen Black once, a few years ago when her friend, Cinema Retro columnist David Savage, brought her to the Players club in New York City. Black had asked if she could bring along a "couple" of friends, which turned out to be about a dozen people including such talents as Alan Cumming and Andrea McArdle. It was a wonderful evening, as this charming lady regaled us with fascinating tales about her long career, which she told me had been derailed due to the financial failure of The Day of the Locust, the 1975 big budget boxoffice flop. Black had the starring role and she said that studios blamed her for the film's failure, although she cited behind the scenes talent as the real reason the movie lost money. She was too considerate even then to name the people she felt were the real culprits, but she did say it was the most unhappy experience of her career. She also discussed her long friendship with co-star Jack Nicholson, who always referred to her as "Blackie" and laughingly said that the role she probably still gets the most fan mail from was the 1975 cult classic TV movie Trilogy of Terror in which she played multiple roles. I recall just how ageless Karen Black seemed that night. She was still very much a head-turner and was charming and funny. I will greatly miss her, as will anyone else who has admired her considerable talents over the decades.
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