Longtime Hollywood actress Karen Black, who appeared in some of the great films of what was coined “The New Hollywood,” which started with the counterculture movement of filmmaking in the late 1960s, has died at the age of 74, reports CBS News.
Black’s husband, Stephen Eckelberry, confirmed the news via a Facebook post on today. Black passed away from complications of cancer.
Black, with her piercing eyes, jet black hair, and thick lips, had the kind of visage and versatility which endeared to projects that were A-list, like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces (in which she netted a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination for her role in that picture as the ditzy and careless waitress girlfriend to Jack Nicholson’s character), and a country star with a mean streak in Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece Nashville (in which she, like the rest of the cast, actually sang their own songs), and also projects that were downright Z-list (Killer Fish, Channel Solitaire, Killing Heat, and other direct-to-video before the term existed cinematic flotsam and jetsam), and all in between.
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