Linda Manz, also known through his wife Linda Guthrie, actress from Days of Heaven and Out of the Blue, died Friday, according to a message posted on social media through the family circle. She’s 58.
A GoFundMe page created through his son Michael Guthrie for funeral expenses indicates that Manz died after battling lung cancer and pneumonia. “Linda, a loving wife, a worried mother, a glorious grandmother and a wonderful friend we enjoyed through many,” Guthrie wrote through the page.
Manz was born in 1961 in New York City. Her first role came here at the age of 15 in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, as a young teenager traveling with her older brother and girlfriend, traveling staff skipping freight trains in the Texas Panhandle of the Great Depression. The last roles were played through Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, respectively, in a 1970s harvest that also starred Sam Shepard as the rich farmer who represents the third point of a tragic romantic triangle. Manz’s tasty storytelling is a key detail of the poetic charm of the 1978 film.
He continued to appear in Philip Kaufman’s 1979 drama The Wanderers opposite Ken Wahl. The film is based on Richard Price’s novel about a gang of Italian-American teenagers. On Facebook, Wahl posted several polaroid photos of Manz from the film and wrote, “It’s wonderful to paint and I’m grateful to have been able to communicate with her before her death this morning.”
Manz starred alongside director Dennis Hopper in his 1980 cult drama Out of the Blue, a Cannes film festival in which she played a young rebellious elvis Presley fan and punk music, at odds with her former father’s property, performed through Hopper.
She persuaded her to leave the interim retreat through director Harmony Korine in 1997 to play the mother of Solomon, one of Gummo’s outdoor fringe teens, an unconventional drama set in a small Ohio town that had been hit by a tornado.
“I had admired her,” Korine said in an interview with Index magazine at the time. “There was a feeling about him that I liked, it wasn’t even a comedy. It was like how I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about him, a flash. Or they burned. . “
One of his co-star in Gummo, Chloo Sevigny, was one of the independent film artists who protected the recovery and relaunch of Manz’s small but indelible film. Sevigny called Manz her favorite actress, while Natasha Lyonne was another former child actress who expressed admiration for her exclusive gifts as a teenage artist. “The global as a total doesn’t make sense to me, and there are safe havens,” Lyonne said in a 2013 article in Interview magazine. “Linda Manz in Out of the Blue is one of them.”
Manz’s last credits came here the same year as Gummo, with a small role as a roommate in Deborah Kara Unger’s character Christine in the mysterious mystery of David Fincher The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. The actress also gave the impression in the short 1979 CBS sitcom Dorothy.
Among those who contributed to the GoFundMe campaign, one donor recalled her “unforgettable, hard and discreetly nuanced” film performances, while many spoke of the wonderful effect it had on her with only a few major roles.
Manz is survived by her husband, cameraman Bobthrough Guthrie, their children Michael and William and their 3 grandchildren.
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