Shelley Duvall, the actress who captivated moviegoers in Robert Altman classics and brought wide-eyed terror to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, has died at the age of 75.
Duvall’s life partner Dan Gilroy confirmed the actress’ death to the Hollywood Reporter, adding that she died in her sleep of complications from diabetes at their home in Blanco, Texas, where Duvall moved to after leaving Hollywood in the mid-Nineties.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” Gilroy said in a statement.
The Fort Worth, Texas-born Duvall stumbled into a movie career in 1970 when she met director Robert Altman while he was shooting Brewster McCloud in the Lone Star State; he subsequently cast Duvall in the supporting role of an Astrodome tour guide. That black comedy began a lengthy collaboration between the director and the actress, with Duvall appearing in seven of Altman’s films over the next decade.
Following Brewster McCloud, Duvall next co-starred in the filmmaker’s 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1974’s Thieves Like Us, 1975’s country music epic Nashville, 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History, and one of titular 3 Women in that 1977 psychological drama, with Duvall winning Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for that movie. That same year, Duvall made her first appearance in a non-Altman film, popping up in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall as a Rolling Stone reporter.
Three years later, however, Duvall would land her most enduring role, co-starring alongside Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, where she played tormented (both on-screen, and off-camera) wife Wendy Torrance in the Stephen King adaptation.
Duvall’s terror is palpable alongside Nicholson’s menacing, ax-wielding Jack, but her own performance was informed largely by what she endured between the many, many takes on Kubrick’s notoriously arduous shoot.
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable,” Duvall told Roger Ebert in December of 1980. “Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month, and there must be something to primal scream therapy, because after the day was over and I’d cried for my 12 hours … After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.”
However, Duvall’s performance in what has become one of the greatest horror movies of all time has become her defining role, alongside another movie she starred in in 1980, Altman’s Popeye. In that film, Duvall was perfectly cast in the role of Olive Oyl, the sweetheart of the sailor man played by Robin Williams. Popeye marked Duvall’s final collaboration with Altman.
In the years that followed, Duvall appeared in Terry Gilliam’s cult fantasy film Time Bandits, starred in the short film Frankenweenie by a then-unknown filmmaker named Tim Burton, and shared the screen with the likes of Steve Martin (Roxanne) and Hulk Hogan (Suburban Commando).
However, from the Eighties to her lengthy retirement in the early 2000s, Duvall instead devoted herself to the small screen, hosting a series of television shows that brought fairy tales to an audience of children. First there was the Peabody Award-winning Fairie Tale Theatre, then Tall Tales & Legends, and finally Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories. She also appeared as Little Bo Peep in the TV movie Mother Goose Rock n’ Rhyme, which co-starred her partner Dan Gilroy, former lead singer of the Eighties band Breakfast Club (which briefly featured Madonna on drums).
Duvall herself embarked on a brief music career, releasing a pair of albums in 1991. However, it was her musical contribution to Popeye that has had the most lasting impact, as her rendition of Harry Nilsson’s “He Needs Me” later featured in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love.
After leaving Hollywood in the early Nineties in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake — she moved back to Texas after appearing in Steven Soderbergh’s 1995 film The Underneath, which filmed there — Duvall also largely withdrew from the film industry, sporadically appearing in bit parts before retiring from movies and television in 2003.
After a decade out of the spotlight, Duvall sat down for a troubling, exploitative Dr. Phil interview in 2016 where she said she was battling mental illness. However, Duvall assuaged those concerns in a 2021 interview with the Hollywood Reporter that reflected on her legacy. Soon after, Duvall returned in front of cameras for one last role in the 2023 horror film The Forest Hills.
