Shelley Duvall dies at 75
Duvall found working in The Shining a horrific experience and said she would never put herself through that much again. Photo: File
Shelley Duvall, the versatile actor known for her role in The Shining and for her long collaboration with the director Robert Altman, died Thursday aged 75, reported AFP.
Citing her partner Dan Gilroy, The Hollywood Reporter said Duvall died in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas following complications of diabetes.
Born on July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth, Texas, Duvall was discovered by Altman — the maverick filmmaker known for his rich characters, sharp social criticism and keen satire — who cast her in 1970’s dark comedy Brewster McCloud.
The saucer-eyed actor developed a broad repertoire, breaking through with 1975’s Nashville, and going on to portray memorable and eccentric characters that earned her a smattering of awards, including at Cannes, for her role in the acclaimed 1977 drama 3 Women.
Her career was defined by her work with Altman, who she said she kept working with because “he offers me damn good roles.” “None of them have been alike,” she told The New York Times in 1977. “He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him.”
Life-changing role
But it was her role in the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining that would become one of her highest profile roles, as she played opposite Jack Nicholson. Director Stanley Kubrick put her through the ringer to perform the part of Wendy Torrance in the horror classic that sees a writer husband descend into homicidal madness and terrorise his wife and young son. Duvall told People in 1981 the 13-month job was gruelling, and that Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end.”
In one famous scene Nicholson’s character tortures Duvall’s with a baseball bat, which reportedly took 127 takes to satisfy Kubrick. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in January 2021, Duvall had delved into just what the experience had cost her mentally. Explaining the toll it had taken on her, Duvall had said at the time, “After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realise that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.”
Thinking back to that time, Duvall added, “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”
After ‘The Shining’
Duvall may live on in the average filmgoer’s memory as Wendy Torrence, but true to her word, she never put herself through that much pain again and branched out into a range of other roles and genres. In 1977, she made a cameo as a rock journalist in 1977’s Annie Hall by Woody Allen, and played opposite Robin Williams in Altman’s 1980 live-action rendition of Popeye. As a testament to Duvall’s acting range, American film critic Robert Ebert wrote in 1980 that the actor had played more kinds of characters than almost any other young actor of the 1970s. “In all of her roles, there is an openness about her, as if somehow nothing has come between her open face and our eyes — no camera, dialogue, makeup, method of acting — and she is just spontaneously being the character.”
Duvall’s acting career continued steadily in the 1980s as she appeared as Pansy alongside Michael Palin in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981). Wanting to branch out, this would prove to be the decade Duvall took on children’s programming. In 1981, she recorded Sweet Dreams, an album of music for children. A year later, Duvall produced, narrated and appeared on the award-winning children’s show Faerie Tale Theatre. Three years later, she created Tall Tales & Legends, a one-hour anthology series that featured adaptations of American folk tales. As well as this, Duval also appeared as Dixie alongside Steve Martin in Roxanne (1987). However, it was during her years working in children’s entertainment that she eventually met her long-time partner Gilroy on the 1990 Disney Channel Movie Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” The Hollywood Reporter quoted Gilroy as saying.