Linda Blair keeps a child visible beneath The Exorcist’s effects, giving the horror someone worth fearing for. We rate that performance highly; the victim roles and horror work that followed too often narrowed what she was asked to do.
Fi1m perspective
In The Exorcist (1973), Linda Blair keeps Regan MacNeil recognisably a child even when the effects threaten to take over. Blair gives us someone to worry about through the shocks, which is a considerable part of why the film works. We were frightened by the mother’s helplessness because Ellen Burstyn made the need to help urgent and Blair made the child matter. We recommend her performance strongly, without pretending that every shock around it is equally well judged.
The work that followed repeatedly put her back in trouble: Born Innocent (1974) cast her as troubled teenager Chris Parker, before she returned to Regan in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). By the 1980s, she was taking leading roles in horror and exploitation films, including Hell Night (1981), Chained Heat (1983) and Savage Streets (1984). That progression makes the typecasting plain. It also makes a broad judgement of her ability difficult: being repeatedly asked to play a young woman in danger is a limited test of what an actor can do.
William Friedkin gets the crucial relationship right in The Exorcist: Burstyn’s distress has a person at its centre, and Blair never lets us forget her. The question of what we believe becomes secondary to the need to find help. That collaboration is a better guide to her strengths than the succession of horror titles on her credits. The self-aware parody Repossessed (1990) later made use of a public image still tied to The Exorcist.
Her later credits include The Exorcist: Believer (2023), but that is not a film we recommend. David Gordon Green opens quietly and well with two missing girls and a father unable to say what he fears, then lets the exorcism descend into shouting. Its failure does not change what Blair achieved in the original, nor does her name give us a reason to forgive it. Start with her work for Friedkin; returning to Regan need not become a habit.
Biography
Linda Blair is an American actress. She was born on 22 January 1959 in St Louis, Missouri.
Blair began her career as a child model and made her acting debut in the daytime soap opera Hidden Faces (1968–69). She is best known for playing Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress and won a Golden Globe. She reprised the role in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and again in The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Other credits include appearances in Airport 1975 (1974), Repossessed (1990) and episodes of Supernatural (2005) and Murder, She Wrote (1984).
Blair is also an animal rights activist and founded the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation.
