Shelley Duvall, who has died aged 75, would have been an unforgettable movie star at any point in history, with her toothpick-thin body, bingo-ball eyes, Modigliani face and quavering, broken-doll voice. She was lucky to start acting in the 1970s, a time when unconventional, eccentric actors were having a brief break in American cinema. She fell into the orbit of unorthodox directors. Robert Altman I was even more fortunate.
Altman said she “could swing every side of the pendulum: charming, zany, sophisticated, pathetic and beautiful.” She became part of his informal repertory company and appeared in seven of his films.
Her most widely seen performance was Stanley Kubrick In the 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, she played Wendy Torrance, the terrified wife of a psychopathic aspiring novelist (Jack Nicholson), and has become almost as famous as the film itself for the toll it took on her mentally under the director’s relentless filming regime: the scene in which Wendy is chased up a flight of stairs by her husband, helplessly swinging a baseball bat at her, required a total of 127 takes.
“It was a grueling job – 12-16 hour days, six days a week, with a half-hour lunch break, for a year and a month,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “The role required me to cry for at least nine months. Jack had to be angry the whole time, and I had to be hysterical the whole time. It was very difficult.”
The film veers into satire and even outright comedy at times, but one glimpse of Duvall’s pink, exhausted, tear-stained face is enough to remind us that the stakes, for her at least, were high.
But it was Altman who understood her complexities, promoted her passionately and expanded her range: In the same year that The Shining was released, for example, audiences saw her play a character who seemed to come from another planet.
Duvall’s face and physique made her the ideal choice to play the gangly, scrawny Olive Oyl in Altman’s exuberant live-action musical, Popeye. When studio executives suggested Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner instead, the director called Duvall’s casting a “smoking gun,” recalling, “Nobody could play Olive Oyl like Shelley. Nobody could look like her.”
But what made this cartoon character not seem like a cartoon was Duvall’s boundless empathy, the deftness of her slapstick, and the pathos of her delicate, wobbly renditions of Harry Nilsson’s songs. He needs meresulting in a performance of Chaplin-esque sublimity.
Altman first met her while casting the eccentric Brewster McCloud (1970) when a colleague of his had run into Duvall in Houston at a party she was throwing to sell a painting by Bernard Sampson, her soon-to-be husband.
The director called her into a meeting and thought she was pretending to be confused because she didn’t seem to understand why she was there. He asked her to read the book. “What does that mean?” she said.
“She had painted eyelashes on her face and weighed about four pounds,” he recalled. “I thought we’d do a test shoot, so I took her to the park, put a camera over her and asked her questions. I was pretty nasty because I thought she was an actress, but she wasn’t joking, that’s who she was. She was honest and untrained.”
Producer Lou Adler, who was also at the meeting, said she was “like a flower” and “she had the most amazing energy I’ve ever seen in anyone.”
Altman cast her as a guide at the Houston Astrodome who sleeps with and later betrays the film’s title character, a young man with dreams of flying. She also had a small role as a mail-order bride in the sad western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Duvall took the film’s star, Julie Christie, under her wing, and said Altman “taught her a lot.”
Duvall first proved she was more than just a funny face in the Depression-era crime drama Burglars (1974), based on the Edward Anderson novel that inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1948 classic They Live by Night, in which she played Keachie, the unwitting mistress of a goofy amateur gangster (Keith Carradine).
She was raw and uninhibited, with hearts in her eyes and raw nerve endings. Pauline Kael He was smitten with her. “She melts away indifference,” Kael wrote. “He can’t contain his reaction and, bursting with joy, turns to her and says, ‘I’m yours’…She seems able to be herself on screen like no one has been able to before…There’s no pretense in her charm.”
Lily Tomlin, who played Duvall as a country music groupie in Altman’s next film, Nashville (1975), called Duvall’s performance in Thieves “transcendent. She’s sitting on the porch on the swing drinking a Coke, and Keith Carradine comes up to her, and she’s so innocent. Her performance is so tender and funny and heartbreaking. I was just hooked.”
She had a small role as President Grover Cleveland’s wife in Altman’s irreverent Western, Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), but it was in his hazy psychological drama, Three Women (1977), that she played her most complex and mysterious role. She plays Millie Lammoreau, an overbearing caregiver at a Palm Springs senior rehab facility. Protecting the innocent Pinky (Sissy Spacek) as her coworker and roommate, Millie is a delusional picture of herself as the girl of the town and the star of the ball. In a sudden reversal, the story breaks midway through the film, and Millie is thrust into the submissive role.
Duvall prepared for the role by writing copious amounts of diaries, letters, and recipes, and won the film the Best Actress award at the festival. Cannes Film FestivalIt was this performance that led director Kubrick to cast her in The Shining: “I liked the way you cried,” he said.
She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Bobbie Ruth Crawford (née Massengale), who worked in real estate, and Robert Duvall, who was a cattle auctioneer before becoming an insurance salesman. Her family moved frequently during Sherrie’s childhood; by the time they finally settled in their first home in Houston, five-year-old Sherrie had become so used to living in hotels that she would ask her mother where the elevator was.
Her father trained as a criminal lawyer and eventually became a judge. She was educated at Waltrip High School and showed an interest in acting from an early age, once running off the stage during a talent contest after forgetting her lines. She later heard her parents outside her bedroom door speculating that maybe she just didn’t have the talent.
“That was definitely a turning point in my life,” she says, “and I think it inspired me to be a go-getter. I never felt a desire to prove myself out of a sense of vengeance. I felt a desire to contribute and to make my life meaningful.”
She continued her interest in science at South Texas Junior College, but dropped out after a classmate held a dissected monkey close to her face.
Although most of her first decade as an actress was spent working with Altman, she also made occasional television appearances, including Joan Micklin Silveris a film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bob” (1976).
He had a memorable bit part in Annie Hall (1977) as a vapid rock journalist who describes sex with Woody Allen’s character as a “Kafkaesque experience”, and had great fun teaming up with Michael Palin in Terry Gilliam’s inter-century comedy-adventure Time Bandits (1981) as a pair of upper-class fools from different centuries.
She also became known to a new generation as the founder and host of Fairy Tale Theatre, which ran from 1982 to 1987. The series reinterpreted classic tales, helped popularize cable television, and featured performers such as Joan Collins. Carrie FisherMick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher ReeveAmong the directors Duvall has employed are Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Roger Vadim Eric Idle also stars in the film, introducing each episode and reprising several roles, including Rapunzel, the love interest of Jeff Bridges’ prince, and the witch, played by Gena Rowlands.
The show was the first in a series of children’s projects, including an album, further series and the 1990 television special Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme, all conceived by her.
She starred in Burton’s morbidly inventive short film Frankenweenie (1984), which portrayed Mary Shelley as a dog, and played the title character’s best friend in Steve Martin’s comical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac (1987), a fun film.
She had a disappointingly under-filmed role in Suburban Commando (1991), starring wrestler Hulk Hogan, but later appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Underneath (1995), Jane Campion’s adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and Canadian avant-garde artist Guy Maddin’s The Ice Nymphs (1997).
After that, there were no notable roles or screen credits between the comedy film Manna from Heaven (2002) and the horror film The Forest Hills (2023).
During that 20-year gap, articles periodically surfaced asking the question, “Where is she now?” Curiosity gave way to pity and horror after she appeared on the daytime talk show Dr. Phil in 2016 looking confused and shabby. The episode, widely considered exploitative, was titled “A Hollywood Star’s Descent into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall.” She claimed to have received messages from her deceased Popeye co-star. Robin WilliamsShe said, “I’m really sick. I need help.”
It’s true that she had serious problems, including diabetes and mental illness. In the absence of a more concrete explanation, rumors began to fill the void, blaming her frail state for The Shining. But a New York Times profile earlier this year made it clear that Kubrick had nothing to do with it at all, and that the more likely explanation for her prolonged disappearance and decline was a series of shocks and traumas, including the 1994 earthquake that destroyed her Los Angeles home, and the pressures of having to return to Texas to care for one of her three sick siblings.
She is survived by her partner of more than 30 years, musician Dan Gilroy, whose marriage to Sampson ended in divorce in 1974.
