The Blair Niche

It's been 27 years since we saw demon-possessed Linda Blair vomiting green slime. PETER CALDER asks what happened to her.

The righteous might feel inclined to nod smugly and conclude that Linda Blair got what was coming to her. Playing Regan, the possessed teenager in William Friedkin's The Exorcist, she danced with the Devil, they might say - and the bright future an Oscar-nominated child star was entitled to expect turned to dust.

Blair, though, is having none of that. As the remastered, reissued (and problematically recut) version of the 1973 film has been released around the world over the past six months, she's kept pace with it. If this is Tuesday, this must be New Zealand and Blair is talking up a storm down the phone line from her California home (15 minutes, your time starts now) and clearly enjoying the attention.

She's not even sick of giving the same answers to the same questions for the dozenth time today. It is, as she says with what sounds suspiciously like ruefulness, "better than doing nothing."

The youngster who was, for an instant, the movies' most famous adolescent sank almost immediately from view and stayed there. In the 27 years since, she has had roles in a long string of flops, B-grade exploitation pics or made-for-TV movies, often playing some kind of abused or unhappy child - a teenage alcoholic, for example, or a rape victim. Many don't rate a mention in Leonard Maltin's reliably comprehensive movie guides and most that do are dismissed as bombs. Even an attempt at self-parody - the 1990 spoof Repossessed with Leslie Nielsen, which did for The Exorcist what Hot Shots did for Top Gun - was lame and unamusing.

And though she's not talking about it, it's a matter of record that her early success had a distinctly diabolical downside - a string of unhappy love affairs and a dalliance with drugs which culminated in a charge of conspiracy to supply cocaine, for which she was sentenced to three years' probation.

But if anyone's telling her the Devil made her do it, Blair's not listening.

"Many people have trouble in their lives," she says, "and I always say it's not until you walk a mile in someone's moccasins that you understand what they've gone through."

She will allow that early fame brought its own pressures - "It's hard on anyone who is young in the entertainment business and who doesn't make the knowing choices that adults might make" - but now at 42 she says she's found happiness.

Beaming out from her website thealternet.com she looks pure Middle America - a real estate agent, perhaps, or an accountant. But you won't find anything about demonic possession there, or even a mention of the film that made hers a household name. The site is dedicated to health and environment issues and pushes vegetarianism (or what she calls "animal-free cooking") and animal rights ("The Cruel World of Greyhound Racing"). And it's plainly her passion. Three times during our short talk she urges me to visit the site.

"If you go there," she says, "you'll see who I am. I'm very lucky and very grounded and my wealth is my friends."

It seems churlish to suggest that who Linda Blair is may be less interesting that who she was. And she's quick to dispel the idea that the young Regan's actions - vomiting green slime, putting a crucifix where her grandmother would have told her not even to put her fingers - might have damaged the young Linda.

Because the film was shot out of narrative sequence - like most are - she had no sense of what it was about.

"I was completely confused and just did what I was told to do. I think because I was not raised a Catholic, the Devil meant nothing to me. I was just a naive professional actress and that was a safety net for me. It was like I was playing a fictitious creature. It was a monster movie and and I was the monster."

It was, she remembers, an arduous shoot (as it was for Warner Bros; the 105-day shooting schedule ballooned to 200 and the $US7 million budget blew out to $US20 million).

"It required an incredible amount of discipline. We were shooting in sub-zero temperatures [so that her breath would steam] and there were all the demands of the makeup and all the equipment. But emotionally I didn't get involved in the same way the adults would have."

Blair says the new cut of The Exorcist is the cut that writer-producer William Peter Blatty "felt would add more spirituality." It seems hard to see since the notable additions - the infamous spider walk, a medical test sequence and a breathtakingly banal new ending - are scarcely major revisions. But it depends, says Blair, on the beholder.

"What you go to the film with," she says, "is what you take away from it. It's not a horror film and never was a horror film. It's a very deep film."

And what does she think of the new version?

"You'll either like the first one better or you'll like this one better,"she says.

And when gently challenged for her evasion, she immediately contradicts herself. "Either one," she says at last, "is fine with me."