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Q: I just rewatched "Saturday Night Fever" for the dozenth time, and it got me wondering: What else has the actress who played Stephanie done?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

Karen Lynn Gorney has a strange screen resume with a big, mysterious gap that covers the entire 1980s.

Though it's by far the biggest thing she's ever done, Gorney was already a known quantity before playing romantic lead Stephanie Mangano in "Saturday Night Fever" (1977), having starred for years in "All My Children" in the early '70s.

But after "Saturday Night Fever" she had trouble getting work — she chalked it up to being typecast. 

"People didn't know what to do with Stephanie Mangano," she told the Los Angeles Times in a 1990 interview.

She said she'd been offered a "Saturday Night Fever" TV series but turned that down, and instead went to England to try to get a recording career going (her father had been a songwriter). When that failed, she turned to theatrical work and, for a while, managing a New York art gallery.

She returned to the screen in the 1990s, starting small with the role of Woman in Subway in 1991's "The Hard Way." That's a long fall for a lead from one of the biggest film successes of all time (to date, "Saturday Night Fever" has grossed $237 million, which is 67 times its original budget).

The roles haven't gotten much bigger since Woman in Subway, but Gorney's still working. She was last seen in the 2018 indie sci-fi picture "Empathy, Inc."

 

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