Linda Manz (August 20, 1961 – August 14, 2020) was an American actress. She made her feature film debut at age 15 in Terrence Malick's acclaimed period drama Days of Heaven (1978), playing an adolescent girl growing up in rural Texas in 1916. She followed this with a supporting role in The Wanderers (1979). Manz earned critical acclaim for her portrayal of a troubled teenage girl from a dysfunctional family in Dennis Hopper's controversial drama film Out of the Blue (1980). Manz stepped away from her acting profession in the mid-1980s and relocated to Southern California, where she lived outside the public eye and focused on raising her three children. She returned to acting in 1997 with small roles in Harmony Korine's experimental drama film Gummo and David Fincher's thriller The Game. Early life Linda Manz was born in New York City to Sophie E. Manz, and never knew her father. Growing up in Upper Manhattan, Manz had a troubled childhood and a difficult relationship with her mother which led to her running away from home frequently and attending several schools. Manz told People magazine in 1979: “For a long time, I was always asking people to adopt me”. She was initially indifferent to acting but, as she later explained in 2011, it was her mother, a cleaner at the World Trade Center, who encouraged her to seek a career as an actress. Her mother insisted that Manz attend a performing arts academy that taught acting and dancing. Career While at an academy for show business, a teacher told her that the casting director Barbara L. Claman was looking for streetwise kids to appear in a new Hollywood film. Manz turned up unannounced at Claman’s office, “smoking and looking all of 10 years old” but according to Claman “she had that special quality we wanted.” This introduction eventually led in 1976 to Manz being selected at the age of 15 by Terrence Malick to act in his second film, Days of Heaven, as a streetwise orphan who joins her older brother and his lover when they flee Chicago in 1916, and find work, then refuge, with a wealthy Texas farmer. The film was released in 1978 due to its lengthy editing. Manz's part was initially smaller, but Malick was so impressed by her that he made a last-minute decision to have her provide an unscripted, improvised narration. Manz told interviewers,