Actress Karen Black, 74

LOS ANGELES - Karen Black, 74, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and Nashville, died Wednesday from complications from cancer, her husband, Stephen Eckelberry, said.

Ms. Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled, or threatened. Her breakthrough was as a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's Easy Rider, the hippie classic that helped get her the role of Rayette Dipesto, a waitress who dates - and is mistreated by - an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970's Five Easy Pieces.

Cited by the New York Times as a "pathetically appealing vulgarian," Ms. Black's performance won her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award. She would recall that playing Rayette really was acting: Well-read and cerebral, Ms. Black was raised in a comfortable Chicago suburb and had little in common with her relatively simple-minded character.

"If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing," Black told Venice Magazine in 2007. "A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When [director] Bob Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said, 'Karen, I'm worried you can't play this role because you're too smart.' I said 'Bob, when you call "action," I will stop thinking,' because that's how Rayette is.' "

In 1971, Ms. Black starred with Nicholson again in Drive, He Said, which Nicholson also directed. Over the next few years, she worked with such top actors and directors as Richard Benjamin (Portnoy's Complaint), Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (The Great Gatsby), and Charlton Heston (Airport 1975). She was nominated for a Grammy Award after writing and performing songs for Nashville, in which she played a country singer in Robert Altman's 1975 ensemble epic. Ms. Black also starred as a jewel thief in Alfred Hitchcock's last movie, Family Plot, released in 1976.

The actress would claim that her career as an A-list actress was ruined by The Day of the Locust, a troubled 1975 production of the Nathanael West novel that brought her a Golden Globe nomination but left her struggling to find good roles. By the end of the '70s, she was appearing in television and in low-budget productions.

Ms. Black received strong reviews in 1982 as a transsexual in Altman's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. But despite working constantly over the next 30 years, she was more a cult idol than a major Hollywood star. Her credits included guest appearances on such TV series as Law & Order and Party of Five and enough horror movies, notably Trilogy of Terror, that a punk band named itself "The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black."

Ms. Black was also a screenwriter and a playwright whose credits included the musical Missouri Waltz and A View of the Heart, a one-woman show in which she starred.

She was born Karen Ziegler and grew up in Park Ridge, Ill. Ms. Black was married four times, including to Charles Black, whose last name she kept even though they were together a short time. She is survived by Eckelberry and two children.