Actress Karen Black 74, Dies

She was too early for mer but Im sure many other will miss her.

Karen Black, a versatile actress whose name became virtually synonymous with films that reflected and helped define America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including “Five Easy Pieces,” died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 74.

A family spokesperon has confirmed her death.

 Black was born in suburban Park Ridge and went to Northwestern University for two years. She then moved to New York where she first appeared in several off-Broadway productions.

Diagnosed with ampullary cancer in 2010, Black had sought help from the public earlier this year to cover the cost of her medical treatment. An appeal by her husband, Stephen Eckelberry, on a crowd-sourcing website raised more than $60,000.

Among her most famous movie roles was the pregnant girlfriend of Jack Nicholson's character in "Five Easy Pieces," for which she would receive an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

In the film, released in 1970, Black plays Rayette Dipesto, a country music-obsessed waitress who becomes pregnant and is then abandoned by Nicholson's character, Robert Eroica Dupea.

"I'll go out with you, or I'll stay in with you, or I'll do anything that you'd like for me to do if you would tell me that you love me," she says, curled up beside Dupea in an early scene.

With compelling, close-set eyes that gave her a distinctive appearance, Black built a film resume that included prostitutes, murderers, waitresses, transsexuals and thieves. She imbued the portrayals of her often vulnerable, working-class characters with pathos and occasional humor.

"She came along at just the right time, as American cinema was changing in the late 1960s and early 1970s," film critic and historian Leonard Maltin said in an interview earlier this year. "She didn't have a lacquered Hollywood look or demeanor. She seemed like a real person, and that was exactly what the young filmmakers whose careers were blossoming at the time were looking for.

"There was an honesty and a vulnerability about her that suited so many of the characters she played."

In "Easy Rider," Dennis Hopper's 1969 counterculture classic, Black's role was small but memorable as a New Orleans prostitute who drops acid in a cemetery with the lead characters, played by Hopper and Peter Fonda.

Through the first five years of the 1970s, she worked at a fevered pace, appearing in 15 movies. In a 1974 version of "The Great Gatsby," she was Myrtle Wilson, the garage owner's wife who has an affair with wealthy Tom Buchanan. In "The Day of the Locust," the 1975 film adaptation of Nathanael West's novel, she was Faye Greener, a young woman yearning for stardom.

With her proclivity for offbeat roles, she appeared in two films for iconoclastic director Robert Altman, including "Nashville" in 1975, in which she played a country singer and performed three of her own songs. In 1982, reprising a role on Broadway, she was Joanne, a transsexual, in Altman's "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean." New Yorker critic Pauline Kael called the taut performance Black's best.

She also appeared in such mainstream fare as the 1974 film "Airport 1975," playing a flight attendant who lands a crippled plane. "I thought it would be nice to be a dyed-in-the-wool, strait-laced heroine," she told The Times in 1975.

Karen Blanche Ziegler was born July 1, 1939, in Park Ridge, Ill. Her father, Norman, was a businessman; her mother, the former Elsie Reif, was a writer. Black — who took the name of her first husband, Charles Black — attended Northwestern University after high school and soon after headed for New York.

She took classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and had a number of off-Broadway roles, before attracting the notice of critics for her first Broadway appearance in the 1965 thriller "The Playroom." Work in television and films soon followed.