Shelley Duvall Obituary

Toothpick-thin with bingo eyes, a Modigliani face and a quivering, broken-puppet voice, Shelley Duvall, who has died aged 75, would have been an unforgettable screen personality at any point in history. That she began acting in the 1970s, when the unorthodox and eccentric enjoyed a brief window of opportunity in American cinema, was fortunate. That she fell under the spell of the maverick director Robert Altman was another.

Altman said she could “turn the tide all the way: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic – even beautiful.” She became part of his unofficial repertory company and appeared in seven of his films.

Her most widely seen performance was for Stanley Kubrick in his film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining (1980). She played Wendy Torrance, the terrorized wife of a psychotic aspiring novelist (Jack Nicholson). Almost as famous as the film itself was the emotional abuse she endured on the set under the director’s regime of relentless, punishing takes – 127 in all for the scene in which Wendy chases her tormenting husband up a towering staircase, limply swinging a baseball bat in his direction.

“It was grueling — six days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, with a half hour off for lunch, for a year and a month,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “The role required me to cry for at least nine of those months. Jack had to be angry all the time, and I had to be hysterical all the time. It was very, very annoying.”

The film was occasionally tongue-in-cheek and even downright funny, but one shot of Duvall’s pink, tired, tear-stained face was enough to remind us that, for her at least, the stakes were high.

But it was Altman who played on her complexity, promoting her admiringly and helping her reach. In the same year as The Shining, for example, audiences saw her play a character who seemed to come from a completely different planet.

Duvall’s physique and physicality made her an ideal choice to play the bumbling green-bean Olive Oyl in Altman’s outrageous live-action musical Popeye. The director, who called her casting “a deal-breaker” when studio executives suggested hiring Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner instead, noted that “no one else could have played Olive Oyl like Shelley. No one else looks like that.”

But it was Duvall’s bottomless empathy that made this cartoon character anything but cartoonish. Her mastery of slapstick, and also the pathos in her delicate, wobbly rendition of Harry Nilsson’s song He needs meresulted in a performance of Chaplin’s sublimity.

Altman first met her while casting for the zany Brewster McCloud (1970). Friends of his had run into Duvall at a party in Houston she was giving to sell paintings by Bernard Sampson, soon to be her husband.

The director called her into a meeting and thought she was bewildered when she didn’t seem to understand why she was there. He asked her to read for him. “What does that mean?” she said.

“She had painted eyelashes on her face and weighed about four pounds,” he recalls. “I decided to do a test, so I took her to the park, put a camera on her and just asked her questions. I was really mean to her, because I thought she was an actress. But she wasn’t kidding; she was. She was a genuine, untrained person.”

Producer Lou Adler, who was also present at that meeting, noted that she “looked like a flower” and said, “She had the most amazing amount of energy I’ve ever seen in anyone.”

Altman cast her as a tour guide at the Houston Astrodome who sleeps with and then betrays the film’s title character, a young dreamer who longs to fly. A small role as a mail-order bride followed in the elegiac western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Duvall was taken under the wing of that film’s star, Julie Christie, who, Altman said, “taught her a lot.”

It was in the Depression-era crime drama Thieves Like Us (1974) that Duvall first proved she was more than just an unusual face. It was an adaptation of the same Edward Anderson novel that inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1948 classic They Live By Night, starring Duvall as Keechie, the unwitting love interest of a foolish amateur gangster (Keith Carradine).

She was raw and uninhibited, her eyes full of love hearts, her nerve endings seemingly exposed. Critic Pauline Kael fell head over heels for her: “She melts indifference,” Kael wrote. “You can’t help but react; you go to her with joy and say, ‘I’m yours’… She seems to be able to be herself on the screen in a way she never has before… Her charm seems completely unadorned.”

Lily Tomlin, who starred with her in Altman’s next film Nashville (1975), in which Duvall played a country music groupie, called her work in Thieves Like Us “transcendent. She’s sitting on the porch drinking a Coke in a swing, and Keith Carradine comes up to her, and she’s so innocent. The way she played it — so sweet and funny and heartbreaking. It just killed me.”

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 dizzying psychological drama 3 Women (1977) that she delivered her most layered and mysterious work. She plays Millie Lammoreaux, a bossy caregiver at a Palm Springs rehabilitation center for the elderly. Taking the innocent Pinky (Sissy Spacek) under her wing as a coworker and roommate, Millie is a paragon of delusion, seeing herself as a girl about town and the belle of the ball. A plot break midway through the film heralds an abrupt reversal that casts Millie into the submissive role.

Duvall, who wrote extensive diary entries, letters and meal recipes to prepare for the character, won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also this performance that inspired Kubrick to cast her in The Shining. “I like the way you cry,” he said.

She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the daughter of Bobbie Ruth Crawford (née Massengale), who worked in real estate, and Robert Duvall, who was a cattle auctioneer before becoming an insurance salesman. The family moved frequently during Shelley’s early years; by the time they finally settled into their first home in Houston, the five-year-old was so accustomed to hotel life that she would ask her mother where the elevator was.

Her father trained as a criminal defense attorney and eventually became a judge. Shelley attended Waltrip High School, where she showed an early interest in performing, but once fled the stage during a talent show after forgetting her lines. She later overheard her parents speculating outside her bedroom door that maybe she wasn’t so talented after all.

“That was definitely a turning point in my life,” she said. “I think that may have inspired me to be an overachiever. I never felt the need to prove myself out of revenge; I wanted to contribute something, to make my life count.”

She became interested in science at South Texas Junior College, but dropped out after a fellow student held a vivisected monkey close to her face.

Most of her first decade as an actress was dominated by her work with Altman, although she also made occasional television appearances, including the lead role in Joan Micklin Silver’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976).

In Annie Hall (1977), she had a memorable supporting role as a vacuous rock journalist who describes having sex with Woody Allen’s character as “a Kafkaesque experience.” She was a source of amusement in Terry Gilliam’s century-leaping comedy-adventure Time Bandits (1981), in which she and Michael Palin formed a madcap duo playing two pairs of upper-class twits in different centuries.

She also came to a new generation as the creator and host of Faerie Tale Theatre, which ran from 1982 to 1987. The series reinterpreted classic tales, helped popularize cable television, and featured such performers as Joan Collins, Carrie Fisher, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Vanessa Redgrave, and Christopher Reeve; Duvall’s directors included Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Roger Vadim, and Eric Idle. In addition to introducing each episode, she appeared in a handful of roles, including Rapunzel opposite Jeff Bridges as the Prince and Gena Rowlands as the Witch.

The show was the first in a series of children’s projects – including albums, further series and the 1990 TV special Mother Goose Rock’n’Rhyme – all created by her.

She starred in Burton’s morbidly inventive short film Frankenweenie (1984), which cast Mary Shelley in a canine role, and was a cheerful addition to Roxanne (1987), Steve Martin’s comic update of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which she played the hero’s confidante.

She had a disappointingly small role in Suburban Commando (1991), playing wrestler Hulk Hogan, but later appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller The Underneath (1995), Jane Campion’s film adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997).

After that, there were no more notable roles and not a single film credit between the comedy Manna from Heaven (2002) and the horror film The Forest Hills (2023).

It was during this two-decade period that articles periodically appeared on the theme of “Where is she now?” Curiosity was replaced by pity and disgust after she appeared on the daytime talk show Dr. Phil in 2016, looking disheveled and neglected. The episode, widely regarded as exploitative, was titled A Hollywood Star’s Descent Into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall. She was heard claiming to have received messages from her deceased Popeye co-star Robin Williams. She said, “I’m very sick. I need help.”

It was true that she had serious problems, including diabetes and mental health issues. In the absence of more concrete explanations, rumors that her frailty could be attributed to The Shining began to fill the vacuum. But a New York Times profile earlier this year made it clear that Kubrick had nothing to do with it and that a more likely explanation for her prolonged disappearance and decline was a series of shocks and traumas, including a 1994 earthquake that damaged her Los Angeles home and the pressure to return to Texas to care for one of her three brothers, who was ill.

She is survived by musician Dan Gilroy, her partner of more than 30 years. Her marriage to Sampson ended in divorce in 1974.