Actress and one of the early stars of Hair

Born: November 23, 1942;

Died: April 2, 2018

SUSAN Anspach, who has died of heart failure aged 75, was an actress who for a brief period seemed to be at the forefront of a radically changing culture, appearing in an early off-Broadway production of the hippie musical Hair in 1967 and co-starring with Jack Nicholson in the subversive 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces.

In Five Easy Pieces Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, a one-time piano prodigy, now working at a Californian oil field. Anspach played Catherine Van Oost, a pianist engaged to Bobby’s brother, though Bobby and Catherine end up in bed together and he hopes she might run away with him.

Anspach married actor Mark Goddard in 1970, but later claimed that Nicholson was the father of her son Caleb, who was born soon afterwards. Nicholson made it clear that he did not think such things should be made public and initiated proceedings to recover about $500,000 he claimed to have leant her to buy a house. It was settled out of court.

After Five Easy Pieces, Anspach went on to play Woody Allen’s wife in Play It Again (1972) and Kris Kristofferson’s lover in Blume in Love (1973) and she was lined up for a major role in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975). She dropped out claiming Altman was mocking the country music scene, though Altman later said it was because he would not meet her pay demands.

Born in New York City in 1942, Susan Florence Anspach was herself a product of the social shifting sands. Her mother was a wealthy banker’s daughter, whose family disowned her when she married Anspach’s father. He was a factory worker. Anspach left home in her mid-teens, complaining of abuse and neglect. She said her psychoanalyst and the Roman Catholic Church were effectively her parents during this time.

At university in Washington DC she did pre-law and pre-med and eventually ended up studying drama. In New York she found herself in a theatre group with the then-unknown Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight and Robert Duvall. And in 1967 she played the left-wing student Sheila, one of the lead roles, in Hair.

It was effectively the first “rock musical” and was controversial for challenging established social values, its attitude to drugs and sex and its opposition to the Vietnam war, though the on-stage nudity came later when it moved to Broadway. It all seems pretty tame now.

Anspach was not in the Broadway production. But it was not long before she was reaching a much wider audience on the big screen, beginning with Hal Ashby’s The Landlord and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (both 1970). It is regarded retrospectively as a golden age of Hollywood, with new directors and writers challenging established values.

But it was very much a male-led revolution, both in front off and behind the cameras. And Altman was not the only person to suggest that Anspach could be “difficult”. The bottom line was that by the mid-1970s Anspach’s career had effectively stalled.

She went on acting intermittently in films and mainly television into her sixties and she also taught acting. One of her few later films to attract much attention was Montenegro (1981). She played a bored American housewife living it up with some free-wheeling Yugoslavs in Sweden. Vincent Canby of the New York Times reckoned that she was “one of America’s most daring and talented actresses,” but that she had “yet to land a film role that shows her off to full advantage”.

She was married and divorced twice and is survived by her son Caleb and a daughter Catherine, who she had with one of the cast of Hair.

BRIAN PENDREIGH