Linda Blair

At 65 years old, Linda Blair has this physical status:

Linda Denise Blair (born January 22, 1959) is an American actress.

In the film The Exorcist (1973), Blair played Regan, the possessed child for whom she was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Golden Globe.

For Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), for which she was nominated for a Saturn Award, she reprised her role. Blair would appear in several controversial drama films, including Born Innocent (1974) and Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975), before emerging as a sex symbol in the musical Roller Boogie in 1979.

Blair appeared in a number of exploitation and horror films during the 1980s, including the slasher film Hell Night (1981), the prison thriller Chained Heat (1983), and the Grindhouse cult thriller Savage Streets (1984). Blair appeared in many independent films and B movies as well as numerous television credits throughout the 1990s and 2000s; She appeared in many independent films and B movies, as well as several television credits.

She appeared on the Animal Planet series Pit Boss from 2010 to 2012. Blair has publicly supported various charitable causes, particularly animal rights in lieu of her acting work.

Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, a non-profit charity that helps rehabilitate and adopt rescue animals.

Early life

Blair was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 22, 1959, to James Frederick and Elinore Blair (née Leitch). Debbie and Jim are older sisters and older brother. When Blair was two years old, her father, a Navy test pilot-turned-executive recruiter, worked in New York City and the family moved to Westport, Connecticut. In Westport, her mother worked as a real estate agent. Linda began working as a child model in Sears, J.C. Penney and Macy's catalogs, as well as in over 70% commercials for Welch's grape jams and other businesses. Blair won a New York Times job at the age of six for a series of print advertisements. She began riding horses at an early age and then became a qualified equestrian.

Personal life

Blair dated Australian singer Rick Springfield, who was 25 years old at the time, who she saw at a concert at the Whisky a Go Go Go Go. She also dated Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes and Neil Giraldo, guitarist and future husband of Pat Benatar. Blair dated Tommy Shaw, a Styx guitarist, from 1979 to 1981. Blair also dated Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas, who was also named Dandy Mangrum. Blair was in a love affair with actor Wings Hauser in the early 1990s.

Blair said she found Rick James "very sexy" in an interview with a topless pictorial in Oui in 1982. James, who was shown the work by a member of his retinue's family, received the compliment through an intermediary. They were together for two years, and James wrote her hit song "Cold Blooded" about her. "Linda was magical," Rick James' book Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James says about his friendship. A liberated spirit. A stunning mind. A mind-blowing body. She loved getting high and going down as well as I did. We posed topless for a photograph that dominated every room. We didn't worry about it. We were doing our own thing in our own way. I wished it would be a love affair that would last. It didn't happen." James discovered out Blair had been pregnant by him and had an abortion without his knowledge.

She was arrested on December 20, 1977, at the age of 18, 1977, for heroin use and a plot to sell drugs. In exchange for three years of probation, she pled guilty to a reduced charge of cocaine trafficking conspiracy. She was also required to make at least 12 major public appearances to warn young people about the dangers of heroin use.

Blair co-authored the book Going Vegan!

Blair revealed in 2014 that she was treated for an umbilical hernia. Blair lives in Coto de Caza, California, as of 2015.

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Career

Blair began appearing on the short-lived Hidden Faces (1968–69) daytime soap opera. Her first theatrical film appearance came in The Way We Live Now (1970), followed by a small part in The Sporting Club (1971). Blair was selected from a field of 600 candidates for her most notable role as Regan, a possessed daughter of a well-known actor in William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973). She has been nominated for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role. In her role, film critic and historian Mark Clark notes that "Blair matches [adult co-star] Ellen Burstyn note-for-note." Despite the film's critical success, Blair was put under fire for her role in the film, which was described by some as "blasphemous," and Blair has said the film had a huge influence on her life and career. Some journalists speculated about Blair's mental health, implying that the filming process had resulted in her having a mental breakdown, which Blair denied, and she has since been targeted with anonymous death threats. Warner Bros. brought the then-14-year-old Blair on a worldwide press tour in the hopes of proving that she was "just a normal teenager" amid the rumors and media buzz surrounding her.

Blair appeared in Born Innocent (1974), where she portrays a runaway teenager who is sexually assaulted. The film was chastised by the National Organization for Women, the New York Rape Coalition, and a number of gay and lesbian rights groups for its depiction of female-on-female violence; the Lesbian Feminist Liberation condemned it, saying, "Men rape, women don't," and said of the film as "propaganda against lesbians." Blair appeared in Born Innocent (1974), which was also panned, but the box office was a hit. Blair and her older sister, Debbie, moved to Los Angeles in 1975 after a string of jobs led her to a move. Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975) as a teenager who becomes addicted to alcohol; Sweet Hostage (1975) opposite Martin Sheen; and Victory at Entebbe (1976), a dramatization of a real-life hostage situation starring Anthony Hopkins and Elizabeth Taylor.

Blair revived her role as Regan in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), earning a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress of 1978. The film was both a critical and commercial failure, but it was still the most expensive film ever made by Warner Bros. Studios at the time. Blair took a year off from acting and competing in national equestrian circuits under the pseudonym Martha McDonald after filming Exorcist II: The Heretic. In 1978, she returned to acting in Stranger in Our House (retitled Summer of Fear), based on Lois Duncan's book and also in the Canadian film Wild Horse Hank, in which she used her equestrian skills to play a college student saving wild horses from ranchers.

Blair's career took a new turn in 1979 with her appearance in the musical drama Roller Boogie, which established her as a sex symbol. In a small town, she co-starred Dirk Benedict as a young woman who helps a wounded Vietnam veteran flee hostile locals. Throughout much of the 1980s, she appeared in a number of financially lucrative low-budget horror and exploitation films. In the slasher film Hell Night (1981), she appeared alongside Peter Barton and Vincent Van Patten, a young female prisoner, and the exploitation thriller Savage Streets (1984), in which she leads a female vigilante street band attacking male rapists. "Her best since The Exorcist (1973) is the best since The Exorcist (1973)," she wrote in a review of Savage Streets published by TV Guide. Blair also appeared nude in a Playboy issue in 1983. Blair appeared in another women-in-prison film titled Red Heat in 1985, portraying a prisoner of war in West Germany. This was followed by a preview in Blair's direct-to-video film Night Force (1985), in which Blair portrayed a woman who traveled to Mexico to save her friend from terrorists.

Blair's career from 1980 to 1985 saw some critical backlash, with Blair receiving five Razzie Award nominations and two Razzie Awards for Worst Actress. She appeared in a number of low-budget horror films, including Grotesque (1988), opposite Tab Hunter, and the Italian film Witchery (1988), opposite David Hasselhoff. Leslie Nielsen co-starred in the romantic comedy Up Your Alley opposite Murray Langston and the Exorcist spoof Repossessed in 1990, the next year. She appeared in numerous Australian B-movies in the early 1990s, including Fatal Bond (1991) and Dead Sleep (1992).

Blair reunited with director Wes Craven in Scream (1996) and also appeared in a Broadway revival of Grease, playing Rizzo. Didn't You Used to be Satan?, a documentary about her life up to that point and how the film The Exorcist had dominated her career and life in 1997. Blair appeared in Mark Kermode's 1998 BBC documentary The Fear of God (which Kermode produced and hosted) as a special feature on The Exorcist's DVD. Blair appeared in a Blair Bitch Project online parody in 1999.

She appeared on L.A. 7 as a regular in the BBC television show, and Fox Family's Scariest Places on Earth, a reality series profiling allegedly haunted locations around the world, hosted from 2001 to 2003. Blair continues to work with the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, which helps save and rehabilitate abandoned, neglected, and mistreated animals and provide them with the essential pet care. As an adult, she became an animal rights activist and humanitarian, collaborating with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Feed the Children, Variety, the Children's Charity, and other groups, as well as promoting teen HIV/AIDS awareness. Blair is on the board of advisors for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Blair went to Mississippi in August 2005, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and rescued 51 abandoned dogs.

In 2006, she appeared on "The Usual Suspects," a CBS television series in which Detective Diana Ballard appears as a detective, as she assists Sam and Dean Winchester. She appeared at the 18th annual Malaga Fantasy and Horror Film Festival in 2008 to receive a lifetime achievement award for her work in the horror genre. Blair appeared in the documentary Confessions of a Teenage Vigilante, addressing her role as Brenda in Savage Streets (1984). On the 2009 DVD release of the film, the documentary was included as a bonus feature.

She appeared on the cable television series Pit Boss and Jury Duty as herself in 2010. She appeared in the 2011 Rick Springfield documentary Affair of the Heart and was a panelist on a 2011 episode of The Joy Behar Show. Blair appeared in late 2011 at the 84th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring makeup artist Dick Smith, who created the iconic makeup for Blair in The Exorcist. Blair was a member of Whoa! in 2013 and has appeared in the films Surge of Power: The Sequel (2016) and the upcoming Landfill (post-production).

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