Shelley Duvall obituary: the unique star of The Shining, 3 Women and Popeye

If there were any doubt that the 1970s were the last golden age of Hollywood, the sad awareness that its leading figures are leaving us, one by one, only underlines how much it was a period of innovation, not least in terms of casting choices. It’s hard to imagine someone like Shelley Duvall becoming a film star in the years before or (as evidenced by the dearth of interesting roles offered to her in the latter part of her career) since. Because there never was or will be anyone quite like her. She was a unique screen presence.

Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949, and raised in Houston. In the sixth grade, she forgot her lines in a talent contest, fled the stage in tears and overheard her parents concluding, “Well, I guess she’s just not talented.” She subsequently decided to become a scientist but dropped out of college after seeing a monkey vivisected. Barely out of her teens, she encountered members of Robert Altman’s crew at a party in Houston where she was trying to sell her fiancé’s paintings. They were sufficiently struck by her looks and attitude to set her up with a meeting with the filmmaker. “I met her and I thought she was just full of shit,” Altman later admitted, as quoted in Mitchell Zuckoff’s biography. “And I was really rude to her.”

Duvall was equally unimpressed with Altman. “I thought he was making some kind of porno movie,” she told Cosmopolitan in 1981. She stayed unimpressed even when informed he was Robert Altman, the director of MASH (1970); “I hadn’t seen the picture, hadn’t heard of him and couldn’t have cared less.” Nevertheless, he cast her in a leading role in his darkly whimsical fable Brewster McCloud (1970), starring Bud Cort as a bird-fixated recluse who lives in Houston’s Astrodome. Playing a kooky tour guide with exaggeratedly long eyelashes and eyes wide as saucers, Duvall’s persona sprang to the screen fully-formed, without a single false note. Despite being surrounded by experienced scene-stealers, she effortlessly walks away with the film, and you can’t wait to see more of her.

Fortunately for us, Duvall would go on to appear in six more Altman films, becoming something of a muse whose apparent quirkiness complemented his unorthodox approach to filmmaking. Sometimes she was part of his ensemble casts: as Ida Coyle, a mail-order bride, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971); Martha aka LA Joan, the heartless groupie in hotpants and platform heels in Nashville (1975); and First Lady to President Grover Cleveland in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976). Her toothy looks and pipe-cleaner physique proved more versatile than one might have expected, her expressive features and unfiltered manner fitting seamlessly into both modern and period settings. She wasn’t playing herself, but, without any formal acting training, instinctively knew how to flesh out her characters’ lives with aspects of her own, making them seem authentic and real.

Altman’s decision to cast her in other leading roles also paid off handsomely. In Thieves like Us (1974), adapted from an Edward Anderson novel previously filmed in 1948 by Nicholas Ray, she gives a heartbreaking performance as Keechie, a garageman’s daughter who falls in love with Keith Carradine’s smalltime bank robber in Depression-era Mississippi. “I knew you were good,” her director told her after this, “but I didn’t know you were great.” 

She is even more extraordinary in 3 Women (1977) as Millie Lammoreaux, who works at a health spa for elderly people in the Californian desert. Altman conceived the idea for the film in a dream, but it’s Duvall and her co-star, Sissy Spacek, whose semi-improvised exchanges bring this Persona-style melding of personalities to credible (albeit still oneiric) life when Millie invites the younger woman to share her apartment. Like the actor playing her, Millie is a character unlike any other, with her incessant, inconsequential wittering, magazine-fuelled delusions and a tragic lack of self-awareness. Initially as annoying to us as to the long-suffering characters in her orbit, she ultimately emerges as so poignantly human you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s one of the decade’s great performances, and won her a Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Duvall’s last performance for Altman is another all-time great. Having been nicknamed Olive Oyl at school, she was at first reluctant to accept the role in Popeye (1980), co-starring Robin Williams in his first leading role. But her loose-limbed movements, off-kilter beauty and wholehearted commitment, without an ounce of self-consciousness, combine into a pitch-perfect live-action rendering of the cartoon character that is positively transplendent and, again, unexpectedly moving.

Duvall also played Pam the Rolling Stone reporter (“Sex with you is really a Kafka-esque experience”) in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977); paired with Michael Palin as eternal lovers Pansy and Vincent in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981); and provided Steve Martin with a faithful confidante in Roxanne (1987), Fred Schepisi’s charming update of Cyrano de Bergerac. But for many audiences, the film for which she will be remembered is The Shining (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel set in a haunted hotel in the mountains of Colorado. As Wendy Torrance, who watches in horror as her alcoholic husband descends into madness and poses a mortal threat to her and their small son, Duvall attains a pitch of hysteria she recalled was physically painful to maintain, particularly when her director reportedly insisted on filming 127 takes of the scene in which she fends off Nicholson with a baseball bat. Nevertheless, her terrified reactions provide the film with many of its now iconic moments.

It was later rumoured, erroneously, that Kubrick’s bullying had put Duvall off acting. But she went on to appear in Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (1984), Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996), and Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) before health issues obliged her to retire in 2002. But not before she had acquired a new generation of fans who had grown up watching Faerie Tale Theatre (1982 to 1987), one of several award-winning star-studded anthology TV series she created and presented, introducing each episode with the words, “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.”