Born: July 7th, 1949
Died: July 11th, 2024
Shelley Duvall, whose lithesome features and quirky screen personality made her one of the most unusual movie stars of the 1970s and early 1980s, appearing in a string of film by Robert Altman and, perhaps most memorably, opposite Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, has died at the age of 75.
Duvall wasn’t planning on a film career when she met Altman while he was filming Brewster McCloud (1970); she had thrown a party to sell her husband’s artwork, and members of his film crew were in attendance. Taken with her, they introduced her to Altman, a director with his own reputation for oddball movies and offbeat casting. He immediately asked her to join the cast, despite her lack of training.
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Duvall said yes – and went on to appear in an unbroken string of five more Altman movies: McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) and 3 Women (1977). She also starred as Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Altman’s Popeye (1980). “I thought: boy, if it’s this easy, why doesn’t everybody act?” Duvall recently told The New York Times.
Her work with Altman cemented Duvall’s career; with her gossamer frame, toothy smile and soft southern twang, she was the go-to actress for any role calling for an idiosyncratic ingénue.
Duvall dated Paul Simon and Ringo Starr. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977. Photographs of her, often wearing a draping, sheer dress and holding a cigarette almost as long and thin as she was, became an enduring image of 1970s celebrity life.
But it was her appearance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining (1980) that, for many viewers, remains her most memorable role. In that movie, she and her husband, Jack (Nicholson), along with their son Danny (Danny Lloyd), move into a mountainside hotel as caretakers while it is shut down for the winter. As Jack begins to exhibit signs of madness, Wendy becomes increasingly concerned for her own safety and her son’s, though she seems to remain unaware of the underlying supernatural forces at work on her husband.
Critics initially found Duvall’s performance overbearing, especially her shrieks as an axe-wielding Nicholson hunts them through the hotel halls. Duvall’s role has since been re-evaluated, especially as critics have come to understand the psychological strain of working under the sometimes difficult treatment of the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick. It was long rumoured that Kubrick pushed Duvall over the edge and out of Hollywood. In fact, she told the New York Times this year, she came to admire him, and in any case she continued to act through the 1980s.
Kubrick was a famously exacting director, often forcing dozens of takes for each scene during the making of The Shining – including 127 for a scene in which a terrified Wendy holds a baseball bat, ready to confront Jack. Throughout that shooting, Kubrick refused to give her a break for water. That, plus off-screen footage from the making of the film, seemed to reinforce the impression that his treatment of Duvall was borderline abusive. But whatever Duvall may have felt at the time, she later said she was thankful for Kubrick’s obsessive precision; it was, she said, the only way for her to access the complex horror at the core of Wendy’s character.
Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up around Houston. Her father, Robert, was a cattle auctioneer turned lawyer, and her mother, Bobbie Ruth (Massengale) Duvall, was a real estate broker. (She is not related to actor Robert Duvall.) She married Bernard Sampson in 1970; they divorced in 1974. She is survived by her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, and three younger brothers, Scott, Stewart and Shane.
After several years of living happily outside the limelight, her physical and mental health began to decline. Gilroy, her partner, told the Times that she became paranoid and reclusive, even calling the FBI to ask for protection. Though in recent years Duvall used a wheelchair to get around her house, she appeared in one more film, The Forest Hills, released last year. It’s a supporting part in a quirky, independent horror movie, but a fitting role for an actor who never intended to act in the first place.
“I went to Lee Strasberg a few years ago because I’d heard such good things about him, but I went to two lessons and it just wasn’t for me,” she told Andy Warhol for a 1977 cover feature in Interview magazine. “That’s one piece of advice Robert Altman gave me at the very beginning – never take lessons and don’t take yourself seriously.”