Since her film debut in 1970 in Robert Altman’s black comedy “Brewster McCloud,” Duvall has established herself as one of the most versatile and distinctive actors of the “New Hollywood” era. Though she had no acting training or experience, that hardly seemed to matter. At a time when Altman and other directors were making unique, idiosyncratic films that defied the studio mold, she represented a new breed of leading lady, captivating audiences with her bunny eyes, lilting voice and effortless style.
“There are no ancestry or influences to help explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she seems to owe nothing to anyone,” film critic Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker. review Ms. Duvall, who co-starred with Altman in the 1980 film “Popeye,” as Olive Oyl, the exasperated lover of Robin Williams’ cartoon character, “maybe has the closest thing to a female Buster Keaton,” she added. “Her quirky grace is like Keaton’s, and it seems to come from within.”
Duvall began her career almost entirely in Altman’s films, becoming a staple in his dialogue-heavy, ensemble-heavy films, playing the bride of an international bridegroom in the 1971 western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” the mistress of bank robber Keith Carradine in “The Robbers” (1974), the wife of President Grover Cleveland in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976), and a distracted young groupie in “Nashville” (1975), a hilarious portrayal of celebrity culture, presidential politics and country and gospel music that was hailed as one of the best films of the year.
She also received critical acclaim in Altman’s 1977 dreamlike psychological drama, Three Women, which also starred Sissy Spacek and Janis Rule, for which she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Her character, Millie Lammour, works at a senior citizens’ center in the California desert and spends her time leafing through magazines, collecting recipes organized by cooking time.
“I put a lot of myself into Millie, especially the parts I don’t want to see — her tuna melt sandwiches and Scrabble and her love of the color yellow — all the vanity and banal things,” Duvall said. The New York TimesShe estimates that she wrote about half of her characters’ lines herself.
The film builds to an agonizing scene in which Millie is forced to give birth to a stillborn baby. Duvall later said that her eerie, unsettling performance inspired director Stanley Kubrick to cast her as Wendy Torrance, the terrified wife and mother in The Shining (1980). “I love the way you cry,” Kubrick told Duvall over the phone.
“The Shining,” based on Stephen King’s best-selling novel, received mixed reviews when it was first released, with some critics calling Duvall’s performance awkward and even cartoonish. But the film has since been hailed as a horror classic, with fans defending her performance as an abused, traumatized wife trying to survive while working as a caretaker at a Colorado hotel as her husband, played by Nicholson, loses his mind.
According to many, making the film was as nightmarish as its story, with the movie reportedly taking 56 weeks to shoot. The Hollywood ReporterThis was an unusually long shoot, due in part to a fire that required rebuilding the Overlook Hotel set, and the director’s rigorous approach: Kubrick had the actors do dozens of takes, including one scene in which Ms. Duvall runs crying through the hotel, swinging a baseball bat at her demonic husband, and holding her young son (Danny Lloyd) in her arms.
“It would have been a life experience like the Vietnam War for veterans,” she told the Los Angeles Times. 1991Looking back on the production, she said: “I worked 12-16 hour days, six days a week, for a year and a month, with a half-hour lunch break. The role had me crying for at least nine of those months. Jack had to be angry the whole time, and I had to be hysterical the whole time.”
In later years, Duvall was quick to say she had fond memories of being on set, playing chess with Kubrick between scenes, but she also said the experience took a toll.
“After a while, your body rebels,” she told the Reporter in 2021. “You’re like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And just the thought of it would make me cry sometimes. I woke up really early on Monday morning and realized I had to cry all day, like I had planned, and I just started crying. I was like, ‘Oh no, no, I can’t, I can’t,’ but I still did it.”
Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth on July 7, 1949, and grew up in Houston, the eldest of four children, to a father who was a cattle auctioneer turned lawyer and a mother who worked in real estate.
Initially, there were few signs that Duvall would pursue an acting career: During a sixth-grade talent contest, she performed a short Joyce Kilmer poem, “Trees,” when she stumbled over her words, walked off the stage in tears, and vowed never to show up to school again.
“That night, I heard my parents say, with the door to my bedroom closed, ‘We just don’t think she has any talent,'” she told the Los Angeles Times. “Isn’t that a classic trope?”
Duvall vowed to become a scientist and earned straight A’s until her senior year of high school, when she discovered “emotions and boys.” Her grades began to slip, and she enrolled in a local junior college, taking classes in nutrition and dietetics, before dropping out and taking a job selling cosmetics at Foley’s department store.
Around 1970, she met some members of Altman’s staff at a party in Houston for her boyfriend, the artist Bernard Sampson. Dressed in patchwork jeans and a Mexican blouse with a bell ringing around her waist, she showed off Sampson’s paintings and tried to interest attendees in selling them. They set up a meeting with other Altman associates, she said. Interview MagazineSo they didn’t give her any artwork, but asked her if she wanted to be in a movie.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, a porn movie,’ because I’d been approached in a drug store when I was 17.”
The film was “Brewster McCloud,” in which she played a tour guide at the Astrodome and met a lonely, aviation-obsessed young man (Bud Cort) trying to build an airplane. It marked the beginning of a fun and rewarding collaboration with Altman, whom she nicknamed “the Pirate” for his daredevil demeanor. “The first and only real advice I ever got from him was to never take myself too seriously,” she said.
Around the same time, Ms. Duvall married Ms. Sampson. The couple moved to Los Angeles and divorced four years later. Ms. Duvall then lived in New York with singer-songwriter Paul Simon. People MagazineThe two met while co-starring in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall, in which Duvall had a small role as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. (“Having sex with you is a truly Kafkaesque experience,” she says.) Allen’s neurotic protagonist speaks.
Duvall went on to have supporting roles in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” (1981), Steven Soderbergh’s “Underneath” (1995), Jane Campion’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (1996) and Steve Martin’s reinterpretation of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “Roxanne” (1987).
She gradually focused more on producing than acting, and drew on her love of picture books (she owned about 3,000 of them, according to a report in The Washington Post) to launch a children’s anthology show, lovingly retelling classic tales in the series “Fairy Tale Theater,” which premiered on Showtime in 1982. Episodes of the show have been directed by filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton, and Williams, her “Popeye” co-star, starred as the Frog Prince in the pilot.
Ms. Duvall was nominated for two Emmy Awards as a producer on the two sequel shows, “Tall Tales & Legends” and “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.” While playing Little Bo Peep in another children’s project, the Disney Channel movie “Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme,” she met and fell in love with actor and musician Dan Gilroy, who became her partner for 35 years.
In addition to Gilroy, survivors include three brothers;
Since the early 2000s, Duvall retired from acting and disappeared from public view, sparking rumors and speculation about what had happened to her. In 2016, she made a rare appearance on the talk show “Dr. Phil” where she spoke about her struggles with mental illness. “I’m so sick. I need help,” she said, before making bizarre comments about evil forces and messages from the afterlife.
The talk show episode was widely criticized as exploitative, and Duvall has since retreated from the spotlight again, returning to her home in Texas Hill Country. She will last be seen on screen in the 2023 indie horror film “The Forest Hills,” opposite Edward Furlong.
The New York Times Mid-AprilIn a profile of Duvall, Amazon.com Inc. said her long hiatus from acting was likely due to “the psychological impact of two events: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which destroyed her home in Los Angeles, and the stress of the illness of one of her brothers, which prompted her to return to her native Texas 30 years ago.”
Duvall, too, seems troubled by the trajectory of her career. “I was a star, I was playing leading roles,” she told the paper, shaking her head. “People think it’s just about aging, but it’s not. It’s violence.”
“How would you feel if someone who was really nice to you suddenly turned their back on you?” she continued. “You wouldn’t believe it unless it actually happened to you. It hurts because you can’t really believe it’s true.”
