Experiment Perilous: In Memorium One Year On: Karen Black WAS the Seventies

In early 1970s, there was a surplus of straight-haired slap-free studiedly nonchalant actresses in Hollywood – Katherine Ross, Jennifer O’ Neill, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw - all supposedly embodying the fruits of freedom as borne by the stinking sixties. In truth though, the New Hollywood was Testosterone Town, and Ross’s appearance in The Stepford Wives in 1975 would seem to be the logical conclusion of the half-decade.

This was also the late Karen Black’s time, but she’d be forever an outsider in said sorority. Her ripe-lipped rapaciousness and blazing sapphire eyes marked her out as too bizarre for romantic leads and too sexy for character roles. She looked - always - as though she’d dine on leading men, so it was a constant source of amazement to me that Tarantino never snapped her up from the cult straight-to-home-viewing treadmill she was on for the last 25 years of her career, in order to play a no-restraint-brooking leather-clad motorcycle mama, or something.

The former Karen Blanche Zeigler was born in Illinois in 1939 and paid her dues on the Great White Way before her pal Jack Nicholson cast her as an acid-tripping whore in 1969’s Easy Rider. The following year she turned in an Oscar-nominated performance as Nicholson’s trashily endearing girlfriend Rayette, in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. Probably her most revered role, it’s a mercy in some ways that her character’s persona wasn’t an indication of things to come. For Rayette is needy, clammy and passive. It hardly seems accidental that she’s got ‘Stand by Your Man’ blaring from her Dansette when we first see her. But she’s also warm, loyal, romantic and real.

As Rayette in Five Easy Pieces (1970)

As a wannabe country singer and an unselfconscious, coral-haired diner waitress (America’s equivalent of the warm-hearted barmaid), Rayette was the start of something in the sense that she’s the first in a line of Black’s carnal prole gals who cannot escape the gravitational pull of their backgrounds. Nicholson’s class-tourist treats her like the shit on his shoes for the bulk of this film, until he perceives his Patrician family are judging her and does a volte-face, a rare display of gallantry on his character’s part which seems to make Rayette’s heart burst.

With Kris Kristofferson in Cisco Pike (1972)

From here, Black switched between cult credibility (opposite Kris Kristofferson and several bricks of hash in Cisco Pike, as a smack-addicted hooker in The Pyx) and blockbuster corn (the stewardess called upon to fly a cast of ageing legends to safety in Airport 75).

In Nashville (1975)

But it was in Hollywood’s partially faithful versions of the cream of American literature that she truly shone, playing two working-class girls who meet premature ends before their respective bitterness curdles their beauty, which may be the only power they have. (In some ways, she was continuing a tradition previously served so well by Gloria Grahame.)

Jazz Age Jezebel: As Myrtle in The Great Gatsby (1974)

Her Myrtle in The Great Gatsby was a million miles away, physically, from the fleshy slattern that F. Scott Fitzgerald described, but, moving languidly across the screen, her hair the colour of dried blood, Black’s Myrtle is bursting with sensuality and frustration, bringing a desperate pathos to the shimmering soft focus of what’s ultimately an interesting failure.

In John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust, adapted from Nathaniel West’s savage, nihilistic novel about Hollywood’s Depression-era desperados, she was wannabe starlet Faye Greener, cruel and sexy in a solarised, platinumed bob, lashing out like a burned cat at the kind acts of Donald’s Sutherland’s tragic simpleton. Her portrayal of that vile, talentless, narcissistic, spite-ridden girl was a study in soft-focus sadness; in short, she was the rotten heart of a movie dealing with (in West's partisan view) a rotten town.

Hollywood Gothic: Day of the Locust (1974)

She took the lead in all three sections of Trilogy of Terror, almost upstaged in the exoticism stakes by a Zuni doll, which chases her around her apartment with hilarious, murderous intent, and even stood out amid the constellation of stars in Robert Altman’s Nashville, where she’s disturbingly convincing as a dumb, arrogant broad. The following year, 1976, she was bewigged, ruthless and cool as a julep in Hitchcock’s pitiful swansong, Family Plot.

It's got TEETH! Trilogy of Terror (1975)

Only in Hollywood could a woman of prodigious intelligence (Black entered higher education at 15) and singular looks be thought unlucky. But starting at the top, she seems to have managed to exploit said qualities handsomely: her filmography suggests a work ethic of Leviathan proportions and a total lack of cultural snobbery (e.g. House of 1000 Corpses and Stuck! Steve Balderson’s 2009 homage to ‘70s babes-in-the-slammer flicks in which Black co-starred with Mink Stole, would struggle to claim even cult status.)

Giving Jennifer Coolidge sleepless nights in House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

Black sang too – and even did so once with L7, of all people. She also sang in Nashville and Gypsy 83 (2001), in which she was touching as a sad-eyed, never-was lounge-pop crooner, chuffing on cigarillos and flicking her marabou stole. But her standing in the musical world is arguably stronger in terms of her name than her (good) voice, all thanks to schlock-horror performance-art metallers and underground legends, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. They’ve never been known to make their audiences comfortable, much like their strangely beautiful and beautifully strange namesake.