Karen Black dies at 74; film and TV actress Ms. Black, who appeared in nearly 200 film and television roles, projected an unconventional allure. She had close-set eyes that could appear crossed from certain camera angles and possessed an intense sexual charisma that gave her an alarmingly unpredictable screen persona. She nearly and almost single-handedly brought an X rating to one early film role. Jack Nicholson once called her "the most lucid actress I've ever worked with. You tell her where it's at and she grabs it. She brought surprising depth of empathy and vulnerability to a range of not-very-bright characters. In the early 1970s, Ms. Black was one of the busiest leading actresses in Hollywood, propelled by what Time magazine once described as her "freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness. Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors. Her background was Chicago bourgeois, but she rebelled by quitting high school to marry for the first of four times. After years of stage work, Ms. Black appeared in "Easy Rider" (1969), the low-budget but ambitious biker movie directed and co-written by Dennis Hopper that exploded commercially. In the film, Ms. Black and the biker antiheroes (Hopper and Peter Fonda) drop LSD in a New Orleans cemetery to hallucinogenic imagery and pulsating rock music. The film was meant to evoke the 1960s counterculture and was a riposte to bloated musicals and arch dramas and comedies that failed to connect with American youth at a time of deep social unrest. Of the film's appeal, Ms. Black once told an interviewer that younger audiences simply "wanted to see people throwing up, smoking grass." Nicholson, whose career zoomed after his brief turn as a societal dropout in "Easy Rider," urged director Bob Rafelson to cast Ms. Black opposite him in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970). As Rayette Dipesto, an open- hearted, if dim, short-order waitress impregnated by Nicholson's self-hating wanderer, she earned an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Over the next few years, Ms. Black was less than discriminating in the roles she accepted and played a variety of idiosyncratic love interests. They included the randy faculty wife in "Drive, He Said" (1971), which marked Nicholson's directing debut, and the promiscuous "Monkey" in "Portnoy's Complaint" (1972), starring Richard Benjamin in a poorly received adaptation of Philip Roth's novel.