When Linda McCartney joined her husband Paul McCartney in his band Wings, it took time for some fans to get used to the idea.
A photographer by trade, Linda was not a trained musician, but played keyboard and sang harmony in Wings. Critics were not always kind — and in the new documentary Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, her daughter Stella opens up about the effect such criticism had on her mom, who died of cancer in 1998 at age 56.
“She wasn’t a cookie-cutter example of someone you put in a band. What they, and she especially, had to go through, like when they isolated her voice and ridiculed her? I mean, it breaks my heart,” Stella, 54, says in the doc. “I know that there was pain there. I knew she hurt. She wasn’t like, cold.”
Stella goes on to say that Linda’s resilience in the face of such situations showed “her bravery and spirit. That side to her boosted a side that [Paul McCartney] had perhaps lost.”
McCartney, 83, also recounts some of the flak he and Linda faced for her inclusion in the band, an idea that came to him “spur of the moment” one night while lying in bed and thinking about the possibility of forming a new rock outfit.
“ ‘She can’t do this, she can’t sing, she can’t play piano, she can’t do anything. Oh, they’re crazy man, what’s he got his old lady in the band for? Who the hell is this?’ “ the star recalls people saying.
Still, he says he admired her voice and style of singing, as it gave the songs a “special sound.”
The former Beatle and Linda married in 1969, and remained married until her death. They were parents to daughters Stella and Mary, 56, and son James, 48. McCartney also adopted her daughter Heather, 63, from a previous marriage.
Linda previously opened up about her perspective on the public’s opinion of her in a 1973 interview with NME, saying at the time that it didn’t really bother her.
“I don’t know the public’s idea of me, because it varies so much. Sometimes I hear I intrude, then I hear I don’t come on enough, then I hear I can’t play. I must own up: personally, I don’t get annoyed,” she said. “Just because I married Paul, I’ve become someone people write about, but I don’t care and that’s the truth.”
Man on the Run, directed by Morgan Neville, follows McCartney as he charts his post-Beatles path following the band’s breakup in 1970. The film features interviews with the man himself, plus Linda, their children, Wings band members, Sean Ono Lennon, Mick Jagger and Chrissie Hynde.
The film is in theaters Thursday, Feb. 19 and Sunday, Feb. 22 only and will hit streaming on Prime Video on Friday, Feb. 27.
