Why Linda Blair was never the same after The Exorcist
She explained “The Exorcist was a work of fiction. I didn’t realize then that it dealt with anything in reality.”
While the idea was fictional to Blair, the religious themes were very real to some viewers, and Blair became the target of people who claimed the film was responsible for their religious crises.
She was even accused of glorifying Satan by playing Regan and received death threats.
Speaking to press was also daunting for the 14-year-old, who during press conferences, was peppered by questions from inquisitive journalists, looking for her perspectives on the movie’s concept. As Blair told Dread Central, “The amount of pressure that came down on me wasn’t anything I was prepared for. Especially all the pressure the press put on me. They thought I had all the answers about faith and Catholicism. … It was probably the most awful thing you could imagine.”
Her role as Regan, that she reprised in the 1977 Exorcist II: The Heretic, continued to haunt Blair, who had difficulty finding roles that didn’t present her as a helpless, hapless girl.
She appeared in the 1974 TV drama Born Innocent as a young girl running from her abusive family, and one year later, as the lead in Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic.
Determined to shift industry perceptions, she appeared nude in the October 1982 issue of Oui magazine, a move that backfired, sending her career spiralling into exploitation-type roles.
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Circling back to her passion before The Exorcist, she founded the Linda Blair Worldheart Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating abused and neglected animals.
