Toothpick-thin with bingo-ball eyes, a Modigliani face and a tremulous, broken-doll voice, Shelley Duvall, who has died aged 75, would have been an unforgettable screen personality at any point in history. That she began acting in the 1970s, when the unorthodox and the eccentric enjoyed a brief window of opportunity in US cinema, was fortunate. Falling into the orbit of the maverick director Robert Altman was even luckier.
Altman said she could “swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic – even beautiful”. She became part of his unofficial repertory company, appearing in seven of his films.
Her most widely seen performance was for Stanley Kubrick in his adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining (1980). She played Wendy Torrance, the terrorised wife of a psychotic aspiring novelist (Jack Nicholson). Almost as famous as the film itself was the emotional battering she took on set under the director’s regime of relentless, punishing takes – 127 of them in total for the scene in which Wendy is pursued by her taunting husband up a vast staircase, limply swinging a baseball bat in his general direction.
“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 film tips into irony and even outright comedy at times, but one shot of Duvall’s pink, frazzled, tear-stained face is all it takes to be reminded that the stakes were high for her at least.
It was Altman, though, who tapped into her complexities, promoted her adoringly and helped extend her range. In the same year as The Shining, for instance, audiences saw her inhabit a character who seemed to come from another planet entirely.
Duvall’s physiognomy and physicality made her the ideal choice to play the gawky string-bean Olive Oyl in Altman’s delirious live-action musical Popeye. The director, who called her casting “a deal-breaker” when studio executives suggested hiring the Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner instead, reflected that “nobody else could have played Olive Oyl like Shelley. Nobody else looks like that.”
But it was Duvall’s bottomless empathy that helped make this cartoon character far from cartoonish. Her mastery of slapstick, as well as the pathos in her delicate, wobbly rendition of Harry Nilsson’s song He Needs Me, resulted in a performance of Chaplinesque sublimity.
Altman first met her when he was casting the wacky Brewster McCloud (1970). Associates of his had run into Duvall at a party in Houston, which she was throwing to sell paintings by Bernard Sampson, who was soon to become her husband.
The director called her in for a meeting, and thought she was feigning bewilderment when she seemed not to understand why she was there. He asked her to read for him. “What’s that mean?” she said.
“She had these eyelashes painted on her face, weighed about four pounds,” he recalled. “I decided to shoot a test, so I took her out in the park and put a camera on her and just asked her questions. I was really quite mean to her, as I thought she was an actress. But she wasn’t kidding; that was her. She was a truthful, untrained person.”
The producer Lou Adler, who was also at that meeting, noted that she “looked like a flower”, and said: “She had the most amazing amount of energy I’d ever seen in anyone.”
Altman cast her as a Houston Astrodome guide who sleeps with and subsequently betrays the film’s title character, a young dreamer yearning to fly. A small part as a mail-order bride followed in the elegiac western McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971). Duvall was taken under the wing of that picture’s star, Julie Christie, who, Altman said, “taught her a lot”.
It was on the Depression-era crime drama Thieves Like Us (1974) that Duvall first proved that she was more than just an unusual face. Adapted from the same Edward Anderson novel that inspired Nicholas Ray’s 1948 classic They Live By Night, it starred Duvall as Keechie, the unwitting moll of a goofy amateur gangster (Keith Carradine).
She was raw and uninhibited, her eyes crowded with love-hearts, her nerve endings seemingly exposed. The critic Pauline Kael fell hard for her: “She melts indifference,” Kael wrote. “You’re unable to repress your response; you go right to her in delight, saying ‘I’m yours’… she seems able to be herself on the screen in a way that nobody has ever been before … Her charm appears to be totally without affectation.”
Lily Tomlin, who starred with her in Altman’s next film, Nashville (1975), where Duvall played a country music groupie, called her work in Thieves Like Us “transcendent. She’s sitting on the porch drinking a Coke in a swing, and Keith Carradine is coming on to her, and she’s so innocent. The way she played that – so sweet and funny and heartbreaking. It just killed me.”
She had a minor role as the wife of President Grover Cleveland in Altman’s irreverent western Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). But it was in his woozy psychological drama 3 Women (1977) that she did her most layered and mysterious work. She plays Millie Lammoreaux, a bossy-boots carer at a Palm Springs rehabilitation facility for elderly people. Taking the innocent Pinky (Sissy Spacek) under her wing as co-worker and room-mate, Millie is a picture of delusion, fancying herself a gal-about-town and the belle of the ball. A narrative fracture midway through the film heralds an abrupt reversal that puts Millie in the submissive role.
Duvall, who wrote extensive diary entries, letters and meal recipes in character as preparation, won the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival. It was this performance, too, that inspired Kubrick to cast her in The Shining. “I like the way you cry,” he said.
She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Bobbie Ruth Crawford (nee Massengale), who worked in real estate, and Robert Duvall, who was a cattle auctioneer before working as an insurance salesman. The family moved around constantly during Shelley’s early years; by the time they finally settled in their first house in Houston, the five-year-old was so used to living in hotels that she asked her mother where the elevator was.
Her father trained as a criminal lawyer and eventually became a judge. Shelley was educated at Waltrip high school where she showed an interest in performing at an early age, but once fled the stage during a talent contest after forgetting her lines. She later heard her parents outside her bedroom door, speculating that she may not be talented after all.
“That was definitely a turning point in my life,” she said. “I guess that might have inspired me to be an overachiever. I never felt the need to prove myself out of revenge; I wanted to contribute something, to make my life count.”
She pursued an interest in science at South Texas Junior College, but dropped out after a fellow student held a vivisected monkey close to her face.
Most of her first decade as an actor was dominated by her work with Altman, although she also made the occasional television appearance, including the lead role in Joan Micklin Silver’s adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976).
In Annie Hall (1977), she had a memorable bit-part as a vacuous rock journalist who describes sex with Woody Allen’s character as “a Kafka-esque experience”. She was bags of fun in Terry Gilliam’s century-hopping comedy-adventure Time Bandits (1981), in which she and Michael Palin formed a daft double-act playing two pairs of upper-class twits in different centuries.
She also became known to a new generation as the creator and host of Faerie Tale Theatre, which ran from 1982 to 1987. The series reinterpreted classic stories, helped popularise cable television, and featured performers such as Joan Collins, Carrie Fisher, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Vanessa Redgrave and Christopher Reeve; among the directors Duvall hired were Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola, Roger Vadim and Eric Idle. As well as introducing each episode, she appeared in a handful of roles, including Rapunzel opposite Jeff Bridges as the Prince and Gena Rowlands as the Witch.
The show was the first in a string of projects for children – including albums, further series and the 1990 TV special Mother Goose Rock’n’Rhyme – which were all originated by her.
She starred in Burton’s morbidly inventive short film Frankenweenie (1984), which put a canine spin on Mary Shelley, and was a joyful addition to Roxanne (1987), Steve Martin’s comic update of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which she played the hero’s confidante.
She had despairingly little to do in Suburban Commando (1991), a vehicle for the wrestler Hulk Hogan, but later appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller The Underneath (1995), Jane Campion’s film of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and the Canadian avant-gardist Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997).
After that, there were no roles of note, and no screen credits whatsoever between the comedy Manna from Heaven (2002) and the horror film The Forest Hills (2023).
It was during this two-decade gap that articles on the theme of “Where Is She Now?” surfaced periodically. Curiosity was replaced by pity and horror after her appearance in 2016 looking confused and bedraggled on the daytime talk show Dr Phil. The episode, widely regarded as exploitative, was titled A Hollywood Star’s Descent Into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall. She was heard claiming to have received messages from her late Popeye co-star Robin Williams. She said: “I’m very sick. I need help.”
It was true that she had serious problems, including diabetes and mental health issues. In the absence of more concrete explanations, rumours that her fragile state could be blamed on The Shining began to fill the vacuum. But a New York Times profile from earlier this year made it plain that Kubrick had nothing to do with it, and that a likelier explanation for her protracted disappearance and decline was a series of shocks and traumas including a 1994 earthquake that had damaged her home in Los Angeles, and the pressure of having to return to Texas to care for one of her three brothers, who was ill.
She is survived by the musician Dan Gilroy, her partner of more than 30 years. Her marriage to Sampson ended in divorce in 1974.
• Shelley Alexis Duvall, actor, born 7 July 1949; died 11 July 2024
