The daughter of award-winning children's author Elsie Reif, Karen Black was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in Park Ridge, Ill., on July 1, 1942. She made her onstage acting debut in "The Playroom" (1965) and earned a Drama Circle Critic Award nod for her efforts, landing her first big film role the following year in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now.She topped her star-making turn in Easy Rider (1969) with an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win playing opposite Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces (1970), collecting another Golden Globe trophy for The Great Gatsby (1974) and yet another nomination for The Day of the Locust (1975). Black was even nominated for a Grammy Award for her singing efforts in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975).
Among the actress's more notable work in the new millennium was her dual performance in the critically acclaimed Firecracker (2005).
Family PlotAlfred Hitchcock's final film (at age 76) is an easygoing suspense mystery. An atypically heroic Bruce Dern (who was in Hitch's Marnie 12 years earlier) plays a cabbie who teams with a semi-phony psychic (Barbara Harris) to collect a big reward by finding a kidnapped millionaire. Watch for visual... Read More
Burnt OfferingsThe vacationing Marian (Karen Black), David (Lee Montgomery), Ben (Oliver Reed) and Elizabeth (Bette Davis) rent a Victorian mansion in California for the summer and soon discover that all is not as it should be. For starters, dead plants come back to life and the pool appears to be a sort of trap.... Read More
Mirror MirrorA recent widow and her young daughter try to put their past behind them by moving into a new house. But they soon realize a mirror that belonged to the house's prior owner is a portal to a frightening myriad of worlds housing deadly evil spirits. Read More
Stuck!Paying tribute to the "caged heat" B-movie classics of the 1950s featuring innocent and less-than-innocent women stuck together behind prison bars, this intentionally trashy potboiler includes plenty of tough talk and bad female behavior. Starina Johnson portrays the wrongly accused Daisy, while... Read More
Children of the NightKaren Black, Peter Deluise and Garrett Morris star in this creepy thriller about the bucolic town of Allburg, which is far from the madding crowd of the big city but is now under siege. Just released from a crypt that imprisoned him, a vampire preys on Allburg's residents, turning them one by one... Read More
