She rose to prominence for her work in various studio and independent films in the 1970s, frequently portraying eccentric and offbeat characters, and established herself as a figure of New Hollywood.

That led to a co-starring role in the drama Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which she played a hopeless waitress, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Black made her first major commercial picture with the disaster film Airport 1975 (1974), and her subsequent appearance as Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby (1974) won her a second Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Black played a glamorous country singer in Robert Altman's ensemble musical drama Nashville (1975), also writing and performing two songs for the soundtrack, for which she received a nomination for a Grammy Award.

[5] She took odd jobs working as a secretary, a front desk person at a hotel, and at an insurance office, and lived on "thirty dollars a week.

[17] She made her formal Broadway debut in 1965's The Playroom,[17] which received favorable reviews and for which she was nominated for a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress.

[18] In 1966, she appeared with José Ferrer in a stage production of After the Fall at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, earning an Angel award for best supporting actress.

[19][20] Black returned to film with a leading role in the comedy You're a Big Boy Now (1966), directed by Francis Ford Coppola, portraying the love interest of a young male student.

[24] Black had a supporting role as the girlfriend of a heroin addict in Born to Win (1971) opposite George Segal and Robert De Niro,[21] followed by a role in Jack Nicholson's directorial debut, Drive, He Said, as a promiscuous faculty wife;[21] and the Western A Gunfight, opposite Kirk Douglas and Johnny Cash, in which she portrayed a saloon barmaid.

[21] Black followed these roles with a part in Cisco Pike (1972) opposite Kris Kristofferson and Gene Hackman, and subsequently played a foul-mouthed fashion model in Portnoy's Complaint (1972).

[25] She had a lead role opposite Christopher Plummer in the Canadian-produced horror film The Pyx (1973), playing a prostitute embroiled in a series of occult murders, and later appeared in The Outfit (1973) with Robert Duvall.

[27] Black's first major commercial film[21] was the disaster feature Airport 1975 (1974), in which she played Nancy Pryor, a stewardess forced to fly a plane after a midair collision.

[13] She subsequently portrayed an unfaithful wife, Myrtle Wilson, in the 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, a performance that earned her a second Golden Globe Award in the same category.

In 1975, she played multiple roles in Dan Curtis' televised anthology film Trilogy of Terror: The segments, all written by Richard Matheson, were named after the women involved in the plot — a plain college professor seemingly seduced by a handsome cad of a student ("Julie"), a pair of sisters who squabble over their father's inheritance ("Millicent and Therese"), and the unknowing purchaser of a cursed Zuni fetish that comes to life and pursues her relentlessly ("Amelia").

Black received her third Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress for her role as an aspiring starlet in 1930s Hollywood in John Schlesinger's tragic drama The Day of the Locust (1975).

"[30] She also reunited with director Dan Curtis to star opposite Oliver Reed and Bette Davis in the supernatural horror film Burnt Offerings, playing the wife of a family living in a haunted house.

[33] In September 1976, Black traveled to Toronto to be a guest star on the variety program The Bobby Vinton Show, which aired across the United States and Canada.

She subsequently starred in the drama Killing Heat (1981), based on Doris Lessing's 1950 novel The Grass Is Singing, which focused on race relations in South Africa in the 1960s; in the film, Black portrayed an urban woman who relocates to a rural farm with her husband.

[23] Black spent months preparing for the role, and "did research into pretty depressing statistics about people who've become transsexuals and how they still don't feel complete.

[46] In 1990, Black had a supporting role in The Children (1990), a British adaptation of a novel by Edith Wharton, opposite Ben Kingsley,[47] and in the science fiction comedy Zapped Again!.

[47] She also had roles in the British comedy Rubin and Ed (1991), the martial arts film The Roller Blade Seven (also 1991), and a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player (1992).

Black reprised her role from The Roller Blade Seven in its 1992 and 1993 sequels, and appeared in the direct-to-video comedy The Double 0 Kid (1993), with Corey Haim and Nicole Eggert.

[51] She had supporting roles in a number of other independent films that year, including as a public defender in Ulli Lommel's drama Every Minute is Goodbye,[52] and the exploitation comedy Dinosaur Valley Girls.

[57] In 2000, Black began filming Rob Zombie's directorial debut House of 1000 Corpses, in which she portrayed Mother Firefly, the matron of a family of psychotic murderers.

Upon its release in 2003, the film received largely unfavorable reviews,[58] though it helped cement Black's status as a cult icon in the horror genre.

She co-starred with Natasha Lyonne in America Brown (2004), which won the Golden Zenith Award for Best Picture at the Montreal World Film Festival.

[60] In 2009, Black worked with director Steve Balderson for Stuck!, a homage to film noir women-in-prison dramas, which co-starred Mink Stole, Pleasant Gehman and Jane Wiedlin.

She starred in John Landis' 2010 thriller Some Guy Who Kills People,[61] as well as Aïda Ruilova's surrealist short film Meet the Eye (2009).

"[60] In her later life, Black spoke unfavorably of the formal study of acting, and commented that she found her training both in the university (under Alvina Krause) and at the Actors Studio unhelpful and oppressive.

[51] She was invited to attend the premiere of the salvaged feature film Dark Blood, in which she had played a small part in the original early 1990s shoot.