Shelley Duvall, who has died in Texas at the age of 75, was one of the defining actors of the New Hollywood that emerged, profane and rough-edged, in the early 1970s. Possessed of a huge capacity for emotional openness – sometimes disturbing in her apparent frailty – she helped confirm, as the lessons of the countercultural 1960s percolated, that a leading actress need no longer look as if she’d emerged fresh from the image-honing machine.
Her greatest commercial hit, following acclaimed films for Robert Altman, came with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 1980. Thereafter there were ups and downs – the troughs exaggerated by an entertainment media that still enjoyed making blood sport of supposedly unconventional women. But her life ended with corrections made, as a beloved avatar for creative individuality.
Altman and his team came upon her in her hometown of Houston and reckoned she deserved a screen test. Duvall first appeared in Altman’s Brewster McCloud and went on to shoot another six films for the director, including the unsettling 3 Women, for which she won best actress at the 1977 Cannes film festival. It mattered that Altman never cast her twice in a similar role. She was a groupie in the busy epic Nashville.
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She was a mail-order bride in the revisionist western McCabe & Mrs Miller. She fell for a bank robber in Thieves Like Us. “What she was doing in Altman movies like Thieves was just transcendent,” Lily Tomlin, her costar in Nashville, remarked.
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“The way she played that – so sweet and funny and heartbreaking. It just killed me.”
Following that win at Cannes, Duvall, weathering Hollywood’s embrace of the Spielbergian mainstream, looked to have established herself for the ages. Kubrick cast her early on for the part of Wendy, husband of Jack Nicholson’s psychopath, in the Shining and proceeded to behave with his characteristic obsessiveness.
The shot of her backing away while swinging a baseball bat is said to have broken a world record with an exhausting 127 takes. Duvall did, however, later push back at the suggestion that Kubrick tortured her. “He was very warm and friendly to me,” she said. “He spent a lot of time with Jack and me. He just wanted to sit down and talk for hours while the crew waited.”
Astonishingly, the performance – now acknowledged among the greatest of its time – secured a nomination for worst actress at the first ever Razzie awards. Forty-two years later that reliably tedious body felt obliged to rescind the shortlisting. By that stage, Duvall had been through a wearying cycle of misrepresentation and reappraisal.
She abandoned Hollywood for Texas in the 1990s and, in 2016, appeared in an apparently distressed state on a much-criticised episode of Dr Phil McGraw’s show.
“I found out the kind of person he is the hard way,” Duvall said of McGraw in 2021. “A lot of people ... said, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Shelley’.”
That quote emerged in a Hollywood Reporter profile by Seth Abramovitch that helped set the record straight, revealing a compassionate woman able to address her earlier mistreatment by others with maturity and humility.
It says something that there was no “Shelley Duvall type”.
There was only Shelley Duvall.
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