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Actress Karen Black.

I grew up hearing about Karen Black as far back as I can remember. She would pop up on television and my mother would point her out as a compatriot from their college days at Northwestern University, a mixture of pride and wistfulness in her voice as the memories came back. When I finally got the opportunity to sit down with Karen during the summer of 2007, the venerable actress had turned playwright, with a well-received L.A. production of "The Missouri Waltz," a musical for which she penned the book. Black was alternately eccentric, passionate, grounded and fascinating during our chat, her obvious intelligence shining through the entire proceedings.

“Black brings to all her roles a freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness,” Time magazine wrote about her in 1975. “Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind...

(Tanna Frederick in Henry Jaglom's "Just 45 Minutes From Broadway," above, with David Garver.)

By Terry Keefe

The manner in which Iowa native Tanna Frederick received her break as an actress has sort of become a independent filmmaking legend, but it bears repeating, as a lesson in the type of chutzpah required to get anywhere in the film business. After a few years of struggling in the audition trenches of Hollywood, Frederick was told by a fellow actor that filmmaker Henry Jaglom often responded to fan letters. Frederick proceeded to write a copious letter to Jaglom, praising the merits of his 1997 film Deja Vu…which she had never actually seen. Nonetheless, a correspondence between Frederick and Jaglom began, and eventually, Jaglom gave the actress permission to do a stage production of his 1971 film debut, A Safe Place, the cinematic version of which starred Jack Nicholson, Orson Welles, and Tuesday Weld.