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Karen Black began acting shortly after college, appearing in off-Broadway satirical revues. She trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors' Studio. Her Broadway debut was in a play that closed within a month, The Playroom (1965), but she was acclaimed for her performance and nominated for a Critics Circle award. A year later, 26-year-old filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola cast her in his first professional film, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), a comedy in which she co-starred as one of three women involved with a young man learning about sex. After another film she landed her first important role, as an LSD-taking prostitute in the surprise hit Easy Rider (1969), which featured Jack Nicholson; she went on to appear again with Nicholson in her next two films: Five Easy Pieces (1970), for which she won the New York Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Oscar nomination; and Drive He Said (1971), Nicholson's directorial debut. She went on from there to be one of the screen's busiest actresses, though the quality of her films has been wildly uneven.