Karen Black

A key female performer of the American film renaissance of the 1970s, Karen Black was known for her warm smile, sturdy-yet-fraught quality and imperfectly set eyes. In 1965, Black won a Drama Critics Award nomination in for her Broadway debut in the short-running "The Playroom," but subsequent work in films limited her stage appearances. After earning praise as the small-town waitress who falls for upper-class drifter Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), Black lent her versatility and unconventional beauty to a number of both offbeat and mainstream films, including Nicholson's "Drive, He Said" (1971), Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975), in which she sang and earned a Grammy nomination for her efforts, and Alfred Hitchcock's swan song, "Family Plot" (1976). She did well as the sluttish Myrtle in "The Great Gatsby" (1974), but that same year found herself the object of parody for her silly role as a flight attendant forced to try to fly an airplane in "Airport 1975" (1974). She was the party girl who dreams of stardom in "The Day of the Locust" (1975), and memorably portrayed various characters in the cult-classic TV movie "Trilogy of Terror" (ABC, 1975). Although her Hollywood career had petered out by the end of that decade, she remained a cult favorite, and her 2013 death was widely mourned by fans.