Shelley Duvall was not your conventional looking Hollywood actress and once seen her appearance was unforgettable making indelible appearances in both The Shining, Popeye and many of Robert Altman’s films.
Born on 7th July 1949 in Fort Worth, Texas she moved around the country with her family before settling in Houston at five years old. She showed an early interest in drama entering talent shows but took an interest in science in college before dropping out after the vivisection of a monkey.
She went to audition in 1970 for Robert Altman’s ‘Brewster McCloud’. It was not an intended career move as Altman’s assistants had found her at a party she had thrown to sell paintings by the artist Bernard Sampson who she would later marry. Her audition had her arriving wide eyed and bewildered at the whole process to such a degree that Altman thought she was putting it all on. The film would be the first of seven that she would appear in for the director. By 1974 her marriage to Sampson had ended in divorce but more positive things were round the corner when her role in his film ‘3 Women in 1977 saw her win the Best Actress prize at Cannes. It was a performance that caught Stanley Kubrick’s eye who would cast her in The Shining in a role that would takes its toll on her by the famously exacting director
“It was gruelling – six days a week, 12- to 16-hour days, half an hour off for lunch, for a year and one month,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. “The role demanded that I cry for, whew, at least nine of those months. Jack had to be angry all the time, and I had to be in hysterics all the time. It was very upsetting.”
The gruelling and lengthy 13 month shoot where one notable scene had the director shooting 127 takes and Duvall would later tell a journalist “ I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me’. She would escape back into fantasy for Robert Altman’s live action version of ‘Popeye’ where she was ideally cast as Olive Oyl a role that her appearance would suggest she was born to play and yet Altman had to battle with the studio to cast her. After this she took a supporting role in Terry Gilliam’s superb ‘Time Bandits’ after which she created and hosted the Faeire Tale Theatre which ran for five years from 1982. A number of smaller roles followed in films as varied as Roxanne to Steven Soderburgh’s ‘The Underneath ‘ and opposite Hulk Hogan in ‘Suburban Commando’ but by 2002 she disappeared from the screen for twenty years appearing only once on TV in 2016. It was on daytime talk show ‘Dr Phil’ where her dishevelled appearance caused concern. Gaunt and confused and telling the host that she was receiving messages from the late Robin Williams in a show that was titled thoughtlessly titled, ‘ A Hollywood Star’s Descent Into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall’. It was as insensitive as it was upsetting to watch seemingly exploiting her personal demons and trauma for viewing figures.
Rumours that her mental health issues had been instigated by her time shooting The Shinging emerged but more credence was given to the fact that she had lived through a 1994 earthquake that had destroyed her home in L.A. that was further compounded by the impact of moving back to Texas to look after her seriously ill brother. At around the same she met musician Dan Gilroy with whom she lived for the rest of her life. She briefly returned to acting in 2022 after twenty years away from the screen in the horror film ‘The Forest Hills’ in what would be her last role,
Shelley Duvall died in her sleep from complications of diabetes on 11th July 2024 aged 75 years of age.
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