Haynes' first film was Latitude Zero in 1969, which also starred Cesar Romero, Richard Jaeckel, and Joseph Cotten. She then went on to appear in films such as Coffy, The Nickel Ride, The Drowning Pool, Rolling Thunder, Human Experiments, , and Brubaker. She mysteriously left the acting world in 1980 and was found in 1995 by director Quentin Tarantino and author Tom Graves. In 2015 Graves published a long profile about her titled Blonde Shadow: The Brief Career and Mysterious Disappearance of Actress Linda Haynes that is included in his anthologyLouise Brooks, Frank Zappa, & Other Charmers & Dreamers.
Critical evaluation
Although no comparably substantive treatments of her career have surfaced thus far, Graves and Tarantino are far from alone in citing the integrity of Haynes' work - though some also note a corresponding failure of filmmakers to put it to good use. In her 1977 review of Rolling Thunder in New York Magazine, Molly Haskell remarks:
The men... come off better than the women because they are excused from ever uttering a word. Linda Haynes, who was so exciting and authentically rural in Robert Mulligan's Nickel Ride, has that most thankless role of the adoring and impossibly patient woman who must babble on to fill the silences.
In his book-length critique of cinema's track record, regarding the homecoming veteran, author Emmett Early discusses the same film:
Linda Haynes plays the barmaid with measured abandon. She says at one point, after Charlie has involved her in a violent scene, "Why do I get stuck with crazy men?" Charlie replies, "That's the only kind that's left." He describes himself as already dead when she tries to make love to him. Like Charlie, the movie fails to take advantage of her talents.
Reviewing the 2011 DVD release of The Nickel Ride, Slant Magazine's Fernando F. Croce notes that its downtrodden protagonist :
nevertheless hangs on to a thread of taciturn self-respect largely thanks to his "cracker wife" Sarah.
Reviewing the same film, critic Glenn Erickson notes that the protagonist's "intensely loyal... ex-dancer girlfriend' is portrayed by "the remarkable Linda Haynes."
