Linda Blair Parents: Meet Elinore Blair, James Blair
Lily Fisher
Published Feb 09, 2026
Linda Denise Blair is an American actress and activist. She played Regan MacNeil in the horror film The Exorcist (1973), for which she won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for an Academy Award.
Linda Blair Parents: Meet Elinore Blair, James Blair
Blair was born January 22, 1959, in St. Louis, Missouri, to James Frederick and Elinore (née Leitch) Blair. She has an older sister, Debbie, and an older brother, Jim. When Blair was two years old, her father, a Navy test pilot-turned-executive recruiter, took a job in New York City, and the family relocated to Westport, Connecticut.
Her mother worked as a real estate agent in Westport. Linda worked as a child model at age five, appearing in Sears, J.C. Penney, and Macy’s catalogs, and in over 70 commercials for Welch’s grape jams and various other companies.
Blair secured a contract at age six for a series of print ads in The New York Times. At the same age, she began riding horses, later becoming a trained equestrian.
