The big-eyed, waifish Shelley Duvall, who won the Cannes actress award for Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) and was subjected to Stanley Kubrick’s infamously overpowering directorial genius to star in The Shining (1980), died of complications from diabetes on Thursday in Blanco, Texas, Variety reports, saying it confirmed her death with her partner Dan Gilroy. She was 75.
My beautiful, perfect, wonderful life, my husband, my friend left last night. Too much suffering lately now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley. Gilroy’s statement.
A favourite of director Altman – he gave her the screen role that was Duvall’s introduction to cinema audiences, in Brewster McCloud – she would go on to play three further roles in his films, McCabe ‑ Mrs Miller (1971) and Thieves Like Us (1974) before appearing in the ensemble of Nashville (1975). Following an impressive showing in Nashville, Altman cast Duvall in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, then would allow her odd screen presence the spotlight in Three Women – for which she would win Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and a BAFTA nomination.
Courtesy www.yiddishtheater.comDuvall also appeared in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) as a Rolling Stone journalist. She met Paul Simon on the set, and the pair dated for two years.
Duvall, in a role she seemed to have been born to play, with those outsize eyes, appeared in Altman’s Popeye (1980). But it was her disturbingly dopy health spa assistant in 3 Women that earned her the role of Wendy Torrance – Danny’s and Jack Nicholson’s character’s wife – in Stanley Kubrick’s version of the Stephen King novel The Shining.
The Shining took more than a year to shoot, and tormenting Duvall was the director’s specialty. Several of her scenes in The Shining required more than 100 takes.
Years later, when she spoke to the Hollywood Reporter about the difficult shoot, she said: 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. 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: ‘I don’t know how you do it.’
She also appeared in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and the Steve Martin comedy Roxanne.
Beginning in the 1980s, Duvall created anthology kids’ shows based on literary classics, such as Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-87), Tall Tales Legend (1985-90), Nightmare Classics (1986-87) and Bedtime Stories (1991-92), with directors including Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and Ivan Passer, and guest stars such as Robin Williams, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elliot Gould, Laura Dern, Molly Ringwald and Ed Asner.
Ronee, born in Ft Worth, Texas, met Altman at a party he was throwing, while in Texas directing Brewster McCloud.
Upon moving back to Texas, Duvall appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath (1995) and the following year in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996). She withdrew from acting in 2002.
She led a mostly reclusive life, but starred in a 2016 appearance on the show Dr Phil, which attracted derision for sensationalising her fragile mental health. In 2021, a profile for the Hollywood Reporter magazine writer Seth Abramovitch saw him heading to Texas to find the 90-year-old happy to reflect on her career and welcome as a ‘weird and endearing eccentric’ in her home in the Texas Hill Country.
Eventually, in 2023, she returned to acting, with a small part in the indie horror The Forest Hills, a movie that appeared and disappeared without much fanfare.
She leaves three brothers, Scott, Stewart and Shane, and the singer-songwriter Dan Gilroy, her partner.