Shelley Duvall, Tormented Wife in The Shining

Shelley Duvall, Robert Altman Protege and Tormented Wife in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 75
The versatile actress, also memorable in 'McCabe & Mrs. Miller,' 'Nashville,' 'Popeye' and '3 Women,' produced TV series for kids as well.


BY MIKE BARNES


Shelley Duvall, the saucer-eyed, rail-thin waif who starred in seven films directed by her mentor, Robert Altman, and avoided the ax wielded by an unhinged Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, died Thursday. She was 75.

Duvall died in her sleep of complications from diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas, spokesperson Gary Springer told The Hollywood Reporter.

“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” said Dan Gilroy, her life partner since 1989.


In November 2016, a disheveled Duvall appeared on an episode of the syndicated talk show Dr. Phil and revealed that she was suffering from mental illness. “I am very sick. I need help,” she said. Four years later, THR‘s Seth Abramovitch visited her for a memorable story.

Before she fled Hollywood for her native Texas in the mid-1990s, Duvall had a thriving career as a versatile, one-of-a-kind actress and head of her own production company, Think Entertainment, which created star-studded, innovative children’s programming for cable television that netted her two Emmy Award nominations.


While attending junior college in her hometown of Houston, Duvall was discovered by Altman staff members and talked into taking a screen test. She then made her onscreen debut as teenage seductress and Astrodome tour guide Suzanne Davis in Brewster McCloud (1970).

A decade later, Duvall sang and starred opposite Robin Williams as the iconic comic-strip character Olive Oyl, the strong-willed damsel in distress, in Altman’s live-action adaptation of Popeye.

In between, the childlike star collaborated with Altman as a mail-order bride in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971); as the woman who has a Mississippi romance with bank robber Keith Carradine in Thieves Like Us (1974); as the groupie L.A. Joan, fond of hot pants and platform shoes, in Nashville (1975); as the wife of President Grover Cleveland in Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976); and as Millie Lamoureaux, a fantasizing attendant at a Palm Springs health spa for the elderly, in 3 Women (1977).

Asked by The New York Times in 1977 why she chose to keep working with Altman, she said: “He offers me damn good roles. None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him.

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“I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’ Sometimes I find myself feeling self-centered, and then all of a sudden that bit of advice will pop into my head and I’ll laugh.”

Altman once noted that Duvall “was able to swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic, even beautiful.”

She won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for portraying Millie.

For the film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, Duvall said she was put to the test during the 13-month shoot in England. In the horror classic, she plays the besieged wife Wendy Torrance, who spends a harsh winter at the desolate Overlook Hotel with her writer husband (Nicholson) — who slowly goes mad — and their young son (Danny Lloyd).

Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end,” she said in a 1981 interview with People magazine. “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”