Duvall won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in Three Women.
Actress Shelley Duvall, known for her roles in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and “Three Women,” as well as Stanley Kubrick’s horror film “The Shining,” has passed away, her partner Dan Gilroy told ABC News. She was 75.
“Shelly loved animals, especially birds, and now she is free to fly,” Gilroy said. “Shelly has been in pain for many months and while I will miss my life partner of 34 years, I am glad she will no longer suffer.”
The cause of death was not immediately revealed.
Duvall won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Three Women and later went on to win a Peabody Award as producer and host of the children’s anthology series Fairy Tale Theatre.
Born in Texas in 1949, Duvall was a frequent star of Robert Altman’s films, appearing in seven of his films since her first in Brewster McCloud in 1970, most notably in Nashville (1975) and Three Women (1977).
Duvall’s final film with Altman was 1980’s Popeye, in which she played Olive Oyl, the love interest of Robin Williams’ character.
She also starred opposite Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s 1977 film Annie Hall.
Duvall is best known to audiences for her role in Kubrick’s The Shining. In the 1980 Stephen King adaptation, she played Wendy Torrance, a housewife who fends off her unstable husband, played by Jack Nicholson, in a haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains. The film endeared Duvall to horror fans, though she later expressed mixed feelings about the difficulties of filming the movie under Kubrick’s notoriously heavy-handed direction.
Duvall’s other film credits include Tim Burton’s 1984 short film Frankenweenie, the 1987 romantic comedy Roxanne starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, Jane Campion’s 1996 film The Portrait of a Lady, and 1998’s Casper & Wendy, in which she played the witch aunt played by Hilary Duff.
Duvall hosted several anthology television series, including Shelley Duvall’s Fairy Tale Theatre in the ’80s and Bedtime Stories with Shelley Duvall in the ’90s, the latter of which earned her an Emmy nomination.
Since the early 2000s, Duvall has lived in her native Texas but has rarely been seen in public. The fight against mental illness in recent years.
