Linda Blair
Linda Blair is an actor, born 1959.
Blair's career sits permanently in the shadow of one part she played as a child. Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973) made her a fixture of horror culture, won her a Golden Globe and put her in the running for an Academy Award in the supporting category. There is no version of the fifty years that followed in which that does not define everything.
What came next is the standard child-star story told at unusual speed. She went straight into disaster and television-movie work, Janice Abbott in Airport 1975, Chris Parker in Born Innocent, then Exorcist II: The Heretic in 1977, a sequel that critics and audiences rejected outright. By the early 1980s she was headlining the exploitation end of the market: Hell Night, Chained Heat, Savage Streets, films that wanted her name on the poster and asked very little of the performance.
To her credit, she got the joke before anyone else did. Repossessed in 1990 is a comedy that exists entirely to send up the film that made her, and she plays Nancy Aglet with an admirably straight face. It is the most likeable thing she did that decade. Later appearances have mostly been knowing ones, including an uncredited reporter in Scream and interviews in documentaries about the era she belonged to, and she went back to the franchise in 2023 for The Exorcist: Believer. Her public profile now rests at least as much on her activism as on acting.
Movies (20)
- Scream (1996)
- The Exorcist (1973)
- The Exorcist: Believer (2023)
- Sorceress (1995)
- Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
- Airport 1975 (1974)
- Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies (2020)
- Chained Heat (1983)
- Witchcraft (Evil Encounters) (1988)
- Repossessed (1990)
- Savage Streets (1984)
- Celebrity Nude Revue: Easy 80's Volume 1 (2011)
- Imps* (1983)
- Born Innocent (1976)
- Hell Night (1981)
- Mythos Hollywood - Das Geheimnis des Erfolgs (1998)
- Stranger in Our House (1979)
- Bail Out (1989)
- Perry Mason: The Case of the Heartbroken Bride (1992)
- Zapped Again! (1990)
TV (2)
Where to start with Linda Blair
Nobody needs telling to watch The Exorcist; the useful advice is to watch it for her rather than for the effects, because the performance under all that makeup is doing more than its reputation suggests.
Skip Exorcist II: The Heretic unless famous disasters appeal, and go instead to Repossessed, where she sends up her own defining role and has better comic timing than the 1970s ever asked her for. Airport 1975 is period-piece disaster cinema with her as Janice Abbott, and Born Innocent is the harder watch by far.
For the 1980s run, Hell Night is the most competent of the horror titles and Savage Streets the most representative of what her name was selling by then. The Exorcist: Believer closes the circle, half a century on.