THE MOVIE
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Trilby Beresford
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Her other credits include Philip Kaufman’s 1979 teenage story ‘The Wanderers’, Harmony Korine’s 1997′ of Marginalized Life in the Small Town ‘Gummo’ and the David Fincher thriller ‘The Game’ in the same year.
Linda Manz, also known by her married name Linda Guthrie, an actress in Days of heaven en Out of the blue, died Friday, according to a social media post of family members. She was 58.
A GoFundMe page set up by her son Michael Guthrie for funeral expenses notes that Manz died after battling lung cancer and pneumonia. “Linda was a loving wife, a caring mother, a wonderful grandmother and a great friend who was loved by many,” Guthrie wrote via the page.
Manz was born in 1961 in New York City. Her first role came at the age of 15 in Terrence Malick’s Days of heaven, as a young teenager traveling with her older brother and his girlfriend, traveling workers travel freight trains in the Texas Panhandle of the Great Depression. The latter roles were played by Richard Gere and Brooke Adams, respectively, in a 1970s classification that also portrayed Sam Shepard as the rich farmer who represents the third point in a tragic romantic triangle. Manz’s Tasteful Narration was an important part of the poetic spell of the 1978 film.
She appeared in Kaufman’s 1979 drama The walkers next to Ken Wahl. The film was based on the Richard Price novel about an Italian American teen street band. On Facebook, Wahl posted several Polaroid photos of Manz from the film and wrote, “She was great to work with and I’m thankful I talked to her before she left this morning.”
Manz died alongside director Dennis Hopper in his 1980 cult drama Out of the blue, a competition entry from Cannes in which she played a rebellious boy from Elvis Presley and punk music, in part with her ex-con father, played by Hopper.
She was coaxed out of acting retirement in 1997 by director Harmony Korine to play the stubborn love mother of Solomon, one of the marginalized adolescent outsiders in Gummo, an unconventional drama set in a small town in Ohio that was hit by a tornado.
“I had always admired her,” Korine said in an interview Index Magazine at the time. “There was this feeling about her that I liked – it was not even acting. It was the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her. “A glow. They both burned the screen.”
One of their co-stars in Gummo, Chloe Sevigny, was among indie filmmakers championing the restoration and re-release of Manz’s small but inexhaustible filmography. Sevigny called Manz her favorite actress, while Natasha Lyonne was another former child actor who expressed admiration for her unique gifts as a teen performer. “The world at large does not always make sense to me, and there are safe havens,” Lyonne said in a 2013 function in Questioner magazine. “Linda Manz in Out of the Blue is one of them. “
Manz’s final screen credit came the same year as Gummo, starring as Deborah Kara Unger’s character Christine in David Fincher’s mysterious thriller The game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn. The actress also appeared in the short-lived CBS sitcom from 1979 Dorothy.
Among those who contributed to the GoFundMe campaign, one donor remembers their “unforgettable, powerful, quietly nuanced” film appearances, while many refer to the huge impact they made with just a few major roles.
Manz is survived by her husband, camera operator Bobby Guthrie, sons Michael and William, and three grandchildren.
