Linda Blair Calls The Exorcist Child Abuse, Yet Regan Keeps Bringing Her Back

Linda Blair

Photo: Super Festivals from Ft. Lauderdale, USA / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 22, 1959 St. Louis, Missouri, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Exorcist, Scream, The Exorcist: Believer
Awards	Golden Globe

Midway through Boorman and the Devil, the documentary about John Boorman’s notorious sequel to The Exorcist, Linda Blair explains why she agreed to play Regan MacNeil a second time. She does not talk about the character or the director. She says it was the money. Few actors say that on camera, and fewer about the role that defines them, but Blair has spent a long time saying unwelcome things about Regan. “It was child abuse,” she once told an interviewer about the original shoot, asking that no one ever do that to a child again. And still she keeps opening the door to the girl she played: at fan conventions, in a cameo for the franchise’s revival, and now in a film about its most despised chapter.

That contradiction is the whole biography. Blair has been disowning the experience that made her for most of her adult life, and she has never been allowed to leave it.

Linda Denise Blair grew up far from Georgetown’s haunted staircase. She was the youngest of three children of James Frederick Blair, a Navy test pilot who became an executive recruiter, and Elinore Leitch Blair, and she spent her childhood in Westport, Connecticut, after the family moved there from St. Louis, Missouri, where she was born on January 22, 1959. At five she was already modelling for department-store catalogues, and she went on to appear in more than 70 commercials. A soap opera, Hidden Faces, gave her a first acting credit, followed by small parts in The Way We Live Now and The Sporting Club.

Then came the audition that roughly 600 girls attended. Friedkin chose her to play the 12-year-old whose body is taken over in his adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel, and The Exorcist, released at the end of 1973, turned a child from Connecticut into the face of the decade’s biggest horror film. She won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award in the same category. The critic Mark Clark later wrote that she matches Ellen Burstyn note for note, which is the fairest description of what the performance demanded. The price arrived with the success: rumours of a breakdown, which she denied, anonymous death threats, and a promotional tour arranged by Warner Bros. to prove that she was a normal teenager. “Everyone felt like I was the devil,” she said decades later. “People were unnerved by me.”

Television offered her the opposite of the possessed child, and not always a gentler one. Born Innocent, a television film about a girl in a juvenile institution, became a national controversy over an assault scene; Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic put her inside another adolescent crisis. Airport 1975 brought her into the disaster cycle. In 1977 she returned to Regan in Boorman’s Exorcist II: The Heretic, opposite Richard Burton and Louise Fletcher. Critics savaged it, although it took $30.7 million at the box office, and Blair stepped away for a year to ride on the national equestrian circuit under the name Martha McDonald.

The usual story of what came next is a story of decline, and it is too tidy. In December 1977, at 18, she was arrested on drug charges; she pleaded guilty to a reduced count of conspiracy to possess cocaine and was sentenced to three years’ probation, with mandatory appearances warning young people about drugs. Roller Boogie remade her as a sex symbol, and a run of exploitation pictures followed, from Hell Night to Chained Heat and Savage Streets, while the Golden Raspberry Awards nominated her again and again in the first half of the 1980s. Read as a fall, the decade looks like waste. It was also the only door the industry left open to a teenager it had typecast as innocence violated, and what it offered her was simply the inverse image. Blair took it, and later learned to laugh at the original: she spoofed Regan opposite Leslie Nielsen in Repossessed and turned up, uncredited, as a television reporter in Wes Craven‘s Scream.

The real second act did not happen on screen. Vegetarian for years and vegan from 2001, when she co-wrote the book Going Vegan!, Blair founded the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation to rescue and rehabilitate abused animals. After Hurricane Katrina she brought 51 abandoned dogs out of Mississippi. The acting became occasional: she hosted Scariest Places on Earth on Fox Family, guest-starred in Supernatural and appeared in the Animal Planet series Pit Boss. When she competed on The Masked Singer in 2022 as the Scarecrow, she gave up her place to talk about the foundation. She has described her departure from Hollywood as something that happened without a decision, the consequence of a promise she had made to the animals.

The return to Regan, when it came, was conditional. In David Gordon Green’s The Exorcist: Believer, released in October 2023, she appears briefly as the grown woman, and she has said she agreed only once the filmmakers committed to her wishes for the two teenage actresses playing the new possessed girls. Her role, as she framed it, was to take care of the girls. It was the clearest statement she has made about what the first film cost.

The past year has been less tidy. In December 2025 she disclosed that she had been diagnosed in 2023 with Graves’ disease after a near-fatal thyroid storm. In August 2026, Los Angeles County animal-control and planning officials executed an inspection warrant at the foundation’s property in Acton, in the high desert north of Los Angeles. They reported 251 dogs at a site whose kennel licence, for up to 100 animals, had expired in 2023, and issued two citations: operating an animal facility without a licence and keeping more animals than a residence allows. No dogs were seized; the county ordered veterinary care for three of them and repairs to housing and sanitation. Blair has said the problem is paperwork. She has not been accused of a crime, and the county describes its investigation as ongoing. For a woman whose public identity since the 1970s has been built against the image of a monster, a raid on her rescue is the hardest kind of headline.

That same month, on August 28, 2026, Boorman and the Devil, which David Kittredge premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, opened at the Quad Cinema in New York through Yellow Veil Pictures, and Blair, talking about Burton and about her paycheque, was the most disarming voice in it. She has said she is writing a memoir about how the public and the churches treated her after The Exorcist, and that she would like to act again. If the book arrives, it will be the first account of Regan told by the girl who played her, with no director in the room.