Karen Black, 1939-2013: a ravenous appetite for pretending | Features

Sandy Dennis). While Dennis is giving one of the greatest of all film performances in this picture, Black is right with her, letting her hair down, getting drunk, allowing us to see the fragility and the strength of this woman in equal measure. There are moments in Jimmy Dean where Dennis and Black reach the same level of intensity of the actresses in mid-period Ingmar Bergman films, and that’s a level of intensity and revelation seldom seen in American movies.

At this point, Black’s friend Henry Jaglom offered her a vehicle and a kind of valentine, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983), a charming movie that showed the light colors in Black’s palette. After that, unfortunately, her career was filled with credits but very much touch-and-go. Her films of the last thirty years were the kinds of things you’d catch on late night cable or in the back of dusty video stores, with lurid titles and even more lurid plots swirling around Black’s indefatigable “Why not?” presence. Her only real respite was a double-header opposite a very different indie goddess, Tilda Swinton, in Conceiving Ada (1997) and Tecknolust (2002), where she was billed as “Dirty Dick.”

Black made her own opportunities off screen, often traveling with a one-woman show where she would play all the characters she wanted to play: singers, old women, men, animals. Everything and everyone was fair game when it came to her ravenous appetite for pretending. When she was diagnosed with cancer, Black fought back fiercely, using all of her savings and traveling for new treatments and never giving up because she loved life so much, and because she loved to act so much. A true original, Black wanted to play with us in her own private dramatic funhouse, and she wanted all the attention in the world, and for a brief, crazy period all the attention in the world was hers, and she relished her spotlight as vividly and amusingly and disturbingly as anyone on screen ever has. 

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