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had to be herself. “She barely knew
what movies were,” Billy Weber, the
film’s editor, recalled. Her character
had to be called Linda “because that
was the only thing she would respond
to — it never got through to her that the
other actors had names that weren’t
their real names”.
Initially her free spirit and lack of
discipline gave Malick nightmares.
“She couldn’t remember her lines,
couldn’t be interrupted, and was diffi-
cult to photograph,” he recalled. “Every
time I gave her new lines, she interpret-
ed them in her own way.” Yet he swiftly
came to realise he had a special if raw
talent on his hands. “I started to love her
and I believed in her more than any-
thing else. She transformed the film.”
Gere concurred. “With anyone with
that kind of brilliance, you just give
them space,” he said. “Terry was smart
enough to just let her be, and she’s ex-
traordinary in the film because of that.”
In the end Malick was so taken with
her mix of vulnerability and fierce inde-
pendence that he decided to use her as
the film’s narrator, allowing her to ex-
temporise monologues about God, the
Devil and whatever else came into her
untutored head. “They took me into a
voice-recording studio. No script, noth-
ing, I just watched the movie and ram-
bled on,” Manz recalled later.
“It just used to be me and my
brother,” her improvised narration
began in a hard-edged, streetwise NewYork drawl that sounded like all the
hope and joy of childhood had been
prematurely crushed out of it. “We used
to do things together. We used to have
fun. We used to roam the streets. There
was people sufferin’ of pain and hunger.
Some people, their tongues were hang-
in’ outta their mouths.” She was simply
describing the life she knew. At another
point she mused, “Sometimes I feel
very old like my whole life’s over. Like
I’m not around no more.”
Her fractured and hauntingly poetic
voiceover made Days of Heaven a mov-
ie like no other.
“Her voice sounds utterly authentic;
it seems beyond performance,” Roger
Ebert, the dean of American film crit-
ics, wrote. “Her words are not a narra-
tion so much as a parallel commentary,
with asides and footnotes.”
The film won an Oscar for best cine-
matography and the best director
award for Malick at the Cannes Film
Festival. Yet many felt it was Manz who
should have been rewarded, for she was,
as Malick put it, “the heart of the film”.
Born Linda Ann Manz in New York
City in 1961, she had no interest in act-
ing, although her mother, hoping thather daughter might offer her a route out
of poverty, put her in dance classes and
entered her in talent contests.
Malick claimed they had discovered
her in a laundromat. In reality, Manz
had heard on the street that a casting
director, Barbara Claman, was search-
ing “bars, drug rehab groups and topless
joints” to recruit streetwise characters
for a film and turned up unannounced
at her office one day, “smoking, looking
all of ten years old and with that special
quality we wanted”.
For a while it appeared that the
success of Days of Heaven would make
Manz a child star to rival her contempo-
raries Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal.
The following year she was cast as the
teenage girlfriend of a Bronx gang-
leader in Philip Kaufman’s feature The
Wanderers, another role which in-
volved little research on her part.
She was then cast in Dennis Hopper’s
Out Of The Blue as a pint-sized dis-
affected teenage punk obsessed with
Elvis Presley. “I’ll always be that char-
acter. I’m just a tough little rebel,” she
said in 2014. The word “little” was delib-
erately chosen, for even in adulthood
she stood only 4ft 10in.
When the movie came out, a profile
in Time magazine presciently predicted
that Manz “wouldn’t feel bad if no more
acting jobs come up”, and so it proved.
By 1985 she had married and settled in-
to a life of domesticity with Bobby Gu-
thrie, a camera operator. “There was a
whole bunch of new young actors and I
was kind of getting lost in the shuffle, so
I laid back and had three kids, staying
home and cooking soup,” she explained.
She is survived by her husband and
their children, Michael and William. A
third son, Christopher, died in 2018.
That there was no regret at the stall-
ing of her film career was self-evident.
“I’m not a movie buff,” she said with
cheerful indifference when a journalist
tracked her down at her home in the
Mojave Desert, California. “I haven’t
been to a movie in 20 years.”Linda Manz, actress, was born on August
20, 1961. She died of lung cancer and
pneumonia on August 14, 2020, aged 58Geoffrey Lee
Bibulous Country Life veteran who fought to keep
the magazine in its handsome Lutyens home
Not for nothing was Geoffrey Lee
known as Lunch Time O’Lee. Over 15
years at Country Life, where he rose to
be deputy editor, he rarely missed a
good lunch, be it a case of entertaining
or being entertained.
Country Life was published on a
Thursday and one of Lee’s jobs was to
come in very early on a Monday to pass
the magazine’s late pages, namely edi-
torial and weekend sport and events.
This he always combined with break-
fasting with the printers in a Covent
Garden pub over a pint of beer — the
pubs stayed open all night to slake the
thirst of market porters. Later this mor-
phed into breakfast press conferences
and lunchtime events and many a sub-
editor and secretary started their writ-
ing career when he came back to the
office and handed them a press release
saying “just write this up” while he
closed his door for a snooze.
His greatest coup was to become
Cicerone to a rich American, Mrs van
der Lipp, who loved travel and fine
dining. She had come to tell the editor
about her organisation, the Friends of
French Art, but as he, and the architec-
tural editor, were out, Lee seized the
enviable opportunity to organise the
trips to the best French châ-
teaux, both for wine and
architecture. She would
bring a posse of her
friends and they
would stay in the
Georges V in Paris
and other luxuri-
ous and palatial
hotels and would
be treated to mag-
nificent meals in
grand houses and
vineyards recorded
each year in an album
provided by Lee. They
were much impressed by
Lee’s address, Waterlow Court,
Middlesex, imagining it as a fine man-
sion, not a studio flat in what had begun
as a home for working women. Here
Lee played a crucial role sorting out de-
fective leases for his fellow leaseholders
in their fine Baillie Scott building aided
by the Hampstead Garden Suburb
Trust.
Lee began at Country Life in the
handsome Edwin Lutyens building
commissioned by the magazine’s
founder, Edward Hudson, overlooking
Covent Garden market. The editorial
staff occupied the piano nobile, where
the 32-pane sash windows were as tall
as those at Hampton Court Palace.
The editor was at one end in a palatial
office with superb mahogany bookcas-
es designed by Lutyens. Alas, it was not
for much longer as the magazine’s
grasping owner, IPC Magazines, was
set on selling the Covent Garden prop-
erty at the worst possible moment,
moving the magazine division to the
unlovely King’s Reach Tower just south
of Blackfriars Bridge. It was no good for
restaurants, though the hostelries of
Fleet Street beckoned across the river.
Lee and the magazine’s young archi-
tectural writer Marcus Binney, later ar-
chitecture correspondent for The
Times, fought a spirited campaign
against the move, even trying to buy the
magazine out. Sadly the Lutyens furni-ture did not fit in the new offices. Coun-
try Life always had its fill of eccentric,
colourful and prickly characters and
Lee was the calming influence that en-
sured everything proceeded smoothly.
Geoffrey Edward Lee was born in
1930 in Lyminge in Kent and spent his
first years in Folkestone. An early
memory was of watching in awe the
huge formations of German bombers
on the way to London. His three elder
brothers had been called up and his
father, George, a rather fierce army rifle
and bayonet instructor, had died while
he was at a grammar school in Canter-
bury. His mother, Zilpah (née Sadler),
took on both parental roles.
Having a head for figures, Lee se-
cured a job at the National Provincial
Bank but his passion was to be a writer
and he submitted numerous amusing
short stories for publication, with
enough success to prompt him to move
to London as a freelance. Acceptances
were few, and he took jobs on the gift
counter at Selfridges and as a press offi-
cer at Butlins, though Encyclopaedia
Britannica rejected him as a salesman
because he was not aggressive enough.
Finally he found a job at The Builder, a
longstanding mainly architectural
weekly. From here he moved
to Country Life.
From 1984 to 2003 he
was finance officer to
Historic Houses,
serving under four
presidents. Early
meetings in Ches-
ter Street would
be held over wine
and cigars, with
Lee quietly nur-
sing a glass of clar-
et. His cool diligence
and command of
figures underpinned the
steady growth of the orga-
nisation.
Lee continued in his spare time as a
writer and in his seventies published a
children’s book, The Enchanted Island.
The launch was at Albemarle Street. As
he was leaving he turned to a former
Country Life editor’s secretary, Deirdre
Chappell, and said shakily, “I have had
12 glasses of champagne.”
“If it’s that many how can you poss-
ibly count?” she quipped. Realising he
needed feeding urgently, she steered
him to The Ritz.
For many years he also worked on
year books for the Financial Times.
Though he was much loved by all the
women he worked with, he never mar-
ried and is survived by two nephews.
When he moved to Charterhouse, the
almshouse in Charterhouse Square,
London, he was placed at a table for life
with six other brothers, which resulted
in quite sharp banter as well as much
whisky drinking and talks about crick-
et, travel and opera. Lee’s short stories
and poetry were at last published regu-
larly in the Charterhouse magazine.Geoffrey Lee, journalist, was born on
November 27, 1930. He died after his
blanket caught fire in an accident on
August 17, 2020, aged 89‘I’ll always be that
character. I’m just a
tough little rebel’
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Lee continued in hiALAMYManz drew on her tough childhood for
Days of Heaven (1978), above and top