When the director Terrence Malick was looking for someone to play Richard Gere’s untamed kid sister in the 1978 film Days Of Heaven, he instructed his casting director to find a feral child from the wrong side of the tracks who had “actually lived this life”.
The 15-year-old Linda Manz, hailing from the New York tenements, was the answer. Her life until that point had been brutal. Her father had walked out when she was two and she was brought up by Sophie Manz, her troubled and violent mother, who worked as a cleaner in the Twin Towers and with whom she had “an adversary relationship”. Frequent evictions meant they lived out of a suitcase. Shuffling around run-down apartments, Manz went through half a