Shelley Duvall, the actress who captivated moviegoers in Robert Altman classics and brought wide-eyed terror to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, has died at the age of 75.
Duvall’s life partner Dan Gilroy confirmed the actress’ death to the Hollywood Reporter, adding that she died in her sleep of complications from diabetes at their home in Blanco, Texas, where Duvall moved to after leaving Hollywood in the mid-Nineties.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” Gilroy said in a statement.
The Fort Worth, Texas-born Duvall stumbled into a movie career in 1970 when she met director Robert Altman while he was shooting Brewster McCloud in the Lone Star State; he subsequently cast Duvall in the supporting role of an Astrodome tour guide. That black comedy began a lengthy collaboration between the director and the actress, with Duvall appearing in seven of Altman’s films over the next decade.
Following Brewster McCloud, Duvall next co-starred in the filmmaker’s 1971 Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1974’s Thieves Like Us, 1975’s country music epic Nashville, 1976’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History, and one of titular 3 Women in that 1977 psychological drama. That same year, Duvall made her first appearance in a non-Altman film, popping up in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall as a Rolling Stone reporter.
Three years later, however, Duvall would land her most enduring role, co-starring alongside Jack Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, where she played tormented (both on-screen, and off-camera) wife Wendy Torrance in the Stephen King adaptation.
Duvall’s terror is palpable alongside Nicholson’s menacing, ax-wielding Jack, but her own performance was informed largely by what she endured between the many, many takes on Kubrick’s notoriously arduous shoot.
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable,” Duvall told Roger Ebert in December of 1980. “Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month, and there must be something to primal scream therapy, because after the day was over and I’d cried for my 12 hours … After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.”
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