Linda Manz, who has died aged 58 from lung cancer, gave one of the most haunting child performances in all cinema in Terrence Malick’s 1978 film Days of Heaven, made when she was 15. She played the young sister of a hot-tempered labourer (Richard Gere), who travels with him and his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) picking up farm work across the Texas panhandle during the early 20th century. There had never been a face like hers: bruised, scarred, angular, with a confrontational stare that could soften unexpectedly, she looked at once unformed and prematurely world-weary. “Sometimes I’d feel very old,” she says in the film, “like my whole life’s over, like I’m not around any more.” It wasn’t hard to believe.

A casting call for the part had gone out to schools in New York City. “Linda came in because her teacher thought she was a real character,” said the film’s editor, Billy Weber. “When she came in to meet Terry, she looked at him and said, ‘I liked your script.’ He hired her on the spot!” She was, said Weber, “someone who barely knew what movies were. It never got through to her that the people in the movie, the other actors, had names that weren’t their real names.” Her own character had to be called Linda “because that was the only thing she would respond to”.

“Linda was instinctively brilliant,” said Gere. “And with anyone with that kind of brilliance, you just give them space. Terry was smart enough and sensitive enough to just let her be. And she’s extraordinary in the film because of that.”

If her striking physiognomy and unself-conscious mannerisms were spellbinding, it was her otherworldly narration, which was not in the original script, that helped lift Days of Heaven into a divine class of its own. Malick and Weber had struggled to shape the material in the editing room – Paramount was not shown a cut of the film until 20 months after shooting had wrapped – and it was during this arduous process that the idea arose to use Manz’s musings as a kind of connective tissue. Most voiceovers provide clarity or fill in gaps. This one does nothing of the sort: Manz’s elliptical stream-of-consciousness, given a hard edge by her chewy New York drawl, often goes against the grain of the image, mixing tenses and introducing digressions and non-sequiturs.

“They took me into a voice recording studio,” she told the Village Voice in 2011. “No script, nothing, I just watched the movie and rambled on.” One of the most memorable passages of her narration (“There’s gonna be creatures running every which way, some of them burned, half their wings burning…”) was taken from Manz paraphrasing for Malick the Book of Revelation, which she had recently discovered and about which she was eager to tell him.

“Her voice and her ability to very nakedly, but kind of pleasantly and poetically, describe her universe is mind-boggling,” said Gere. “This movie would not be that movie without that voiceover, wouldn’t be that way without the quality of her voice, just the timbre of her voice is so interesting.”

Malick did not make another film for 20 years; Manz, too, soon disappeared for almost as long. Immediately after Days of Heaven she played Peewee, the plucky, pint-sized girlfriend of a gargantuan skinhead, in The Wanderers (1979), adapted from Richard Price’s novel about 1960s gangs in the Bronx. The writer-director Philip Kaufman was so bewitched by Manz that he created the character especially for her.

She was also intensely powerful in her only lead role, in Dennis Hopper’s punk psychodrama Out of the Blue (1980). She played Cebe, a disaffected teenager struggling to reconnect with her ex-con father (Hopper). Whether playing drums on stage, doggedly singing Elvis Presley’s Teddy Bear as her parents’ marriage disintegrates around her or simply idling on the streets gawping at the world, Manz was electrifying. “I think I was Cebe,” she said.

She was born in New York, where she attended half a dozen schools. Her father had walked out when she was two; “For a long time, I was always asking people to adopt me,” she said. She was raised by her mother, Sophie, a cleaner, who encouraged her to attend acting classes.

Along with Days of Heaven, The Wanderers and Out of the Blue, she also appeared in Boardwalk and as a juvenile delinquent in the sitcom Dorothy (both 1979), which ran for only four episodes in the same year. In the early 1980s, she gave up acting. “There was a whole bunch of new young actors out there, and I was kind of getting lost in the shuffle,” she said. “So I laid back and had three kids. Now I enjoy just staying home and cooking soup.”

She married Bobby Guthrie, who was the camera operator who came to Michael Jackson’s rescue when his hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. In 1997, she made a low-key comeback in Gummo, Harmony Korine’s disturbing portrait of small-town American youth, in which she brandished a gun and tap-danced in over-sized men’s shoes. What she did, said Korine, “wasn’t even acting. It was like the way I felt about Buster Keaton when I first saw him. There was a kind of poetry about her, a glow.” In the same year, she appeared in one scene in David Fincher’s thriller The Game, starring Michael Douglas. As quickly as she returned, she vanished again, leaving a mountainous untainted reputation built on the smallest molehill of work.

She is survived by Guthrie and their children, Michael and William, as well as three grandchildren. A third son, Christopher, died in 2018.

• Linda Manz (Linda Guthrie), actor, born 20 August 1961; died 14 August 2020

• This article was amended on 17 August 2020 to correct a picture captioning error