Ron Faber Dies: Actor Who Delivered Bad News In ‘The Exorcist’ Was 90

Greg Evans
·3 min read

Ron Faber, an Obie Award-winning stage actor whose widest fame came from a brief but crucial scene in the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, died March 26 of lung cancer. He was 90.

His death was only recently announced. In a Facebook post, Faber’s longtime friend and colleague, the actor David Patrick Kelly, remembered him as a “great artist and gentleman with a wonderful voice and laugh.”

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Faber had just won an Obie Award for his performance in the 1972 Off Broadway play And They Put Handcuffs on Flowers when he was spotted by director William Friedkin for the small role of Chuck in The Exorcist.

In the film, Faber’s Chuck is the assistant director of Crash Course, the movie-within-the-movie in which Ellen Burstyn’s actor character Chris MacNeil stars. In a pivotal scene, a stunned Chuck arrives at MacNeil’s Georgetown home to deliver the news that Crash Course director Burke Dennings (Jack MacGowran) has been found dead on the steps outside.

“I supposed you’ve heard,” he says, then realizing his mistake, adds, “You haven’t heard. Burke’s dead. He must have been drunk. He fell down from the top of the steps right outside. By the time he hit M Street he broke his neck.” At this point in the film, no one besides the possessed Regan (Linda Blair) knows that Burke was murdered in a very gruesome way by the demon.

The small role wasn’t the only contribution Faber would make to The Exorcist. Although actor Mercedes McCambridge provided the primary voice of the demon, Faber added some of the deeper, guttural vocal sounds that were layered into the soundtrack to suggest that the more than one demon was inside Regan.

“Friedkin told me that there were three people doing the voice of the demon for the film,” Faber recalled in a 2016 interview with the ComingSoon website. “He was determined to make sure that the devil did not sound like just one person, he wanted it to sound like a legion of voices. So he had Mercedes McCambridge do the core part of the voice of the demon, and myself and someone else, and I never got any credit for it. That was my shock when I saw the movie – Mercedes McCambridge got the sole credit on the end film, so that pissed me off.”

Faber said that despite McCambridge providing the primary demon voice, he did recognize some of his contributions in the final cut. “[T]here were things from that recording that I was certain made it into the final film, and these were mostly sounds that I made – deep guttural moaning and groaning. The sound design people on the film played with the voices, mine included, and did the overlapping and so forth. Mercedes was the person responsible for all the wheezing! She was a well known asthmatic!”

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Faber began his show business career in radio, and later earned a scholarship to the famed Lucille Lortel White Barn Theater in Westport, Connecticut. Subsequent Off Broadway credits include Lucky Stiff at Playwrights Horizons, Troilus and Cressida at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, Woyzeck at the Public Theatre, and, at the Mercer Arts Center, And They Put Handcuffs on Flowers.

TV credits include Kojak, The Edge of Night, Law & Order, Third Watch and Hope & Faith.

Faber is survived by wife Kathleen Moore Faber; children, Hart, Raymond, Elise Manuel, and Anthony; and other extended family. He was pre-deceased by son Eric.

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