Linda Blair life and biography

Linda Blair is an American actress. Blair is best known for her role as the possessed child, Regan, in the 1973 film The Exorcist, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, winning one. She reprised her role in 1977's Exorcist II: The Heretic.

Blair was born in St. Louis, Missouri and raised in Westport, Connecticut. She began her career as a six-year-old child model and started acting with a regular role on the short-lived Hidden Faces in 1968. Her first film role was in 1971's The Sporting Club. Blair was selected from a field of 600 applicants for her most notable role as Regan in The Exorcist. The role earned her a Golden Globe and People's Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress as well as an Academy Award nomination. She reprised her role in the 1977 sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic. As the 1970s closed, she started to land good, demanding roles for which she was prepared, and stepped into the fast lane, for which she was not prepared. Blair encountered trouble as she was arrested and charged with drug possession and conspiracy to sell drugs: after trial, she was found not guilty of possession, but guilty of conspiracy to sell, leading her to get a reduced sentence of three years' probation. Though she tried to act in film, Blair found it hard to restart her screen career and landed low grade films in the '80s and beyond. As she herself said in an interview, her career 'went down faster than the Titanic'.

Blair was nominated for an Academy Award for her Exorcist work, but this campaign was scuttled when it was learned that, not only had the girl been extensively doubled by a dummy, but her horrendous "Satan" voice, explicit obscenities and all, had been dubbed by adult actress Mercedes McCambridge. A major celebrity at 15, Blair was able for a while to parlay her Exorcist work into a series of demanding film and TV roles, most of which cast her as a much-abused victim. Her rape scene in the TV movie Born Innocent was so graphic that the network was forced to cut the scene when the film was rerun. In other appearances, Blair played a teen alcoholic, a kidnap victim, a heart-transplant patient on an endangered airliner, and her Exorcist role again in Exorcist II (1977). By this time, Blair was unable to maintain the equilibrium of her career, which degenerated into exploitative crime or girls-in-prison films. More recently, Blair was seen in Repossessed (1990), a ham-handed spoof of the film that made her famous.

Filmography:

The Exorcist (1973)
Born Innocent (1974)
Airport 1975 (1974)
Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)
Stranger in Our House (1978)
Bad Blood (1993)
Skins (1994)
Double Blast (1994)
Sorceress (1995)

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