Short Biography

Karen Anne Carpenter (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983) was a highly successful American singer and drummer. She and her brother, Richard, formed the popular 1970s duo The Carpenters. She suffered from anorexia nervosa, a little known disease at the time, and died at the age of 32 from heart failure, later attributed to complications related to her illness. Karen Carpenter`s drumming skills, although less generally known than her singing ability, were considerable. But it is for her vocal performances that she is best remembered.

On February 4, 1983, less than a month before her thirty-third birthday, Carpenter experienced heart failure at her parents` home in Downey, California. She was taken to Downey Community Hospital, where she was pronounced dead twenty minutes later. The LA coroner gave the cause of death as "heartbeat irregularities brought on by chemical imbalances associated with anorexia nervosa." Her divorce was scheduled to have been finalized that day. Her funeral service took place on February 8, 1983, at the Downey United Methodist Church. Carpenter, dressed in a rose colored suit, lay in an open white casket. Over a thousand mourners passed through to say goodbye, among them her friends Dorothy Hamill, Olivia Newton-John, Petula Clark, and Dionne Warwick. Carpenter`s estranged husband Tom attended her funeral, where he took off his wedding ring and threw it into the casket. She was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress, California. In 2003, she was re-interred, next to her parents, in a mausoleum at the Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park in Westlake Village, California.

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