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Shelley Duvall
Credit: Wikimedia commons
Shelley Duvall, whose lithesome features and quirky screen personality made her one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s, appearing in a string of movies by director Robert Altman and, perhaps most memorably, opposite Jack Nicholson in The Shining, died Thursday at her home in Blanco, Texas. She was 75.
A family spokesperson said the cause was complications of diabetes.
Duvall wasn't planning on a film career when she met Altman while he was filming Brewster McCloud (1970); she had thrown a party to sell her husband's artwork, and members of his film crew were in attendance. Taken with her, they introduced her to Altman, a director with his own reputation for oddball movies and offbeat casting. He immediately asked her to join the cast, despite her lack of training.
She said yes -- and went on to appear in a string of four more movies directed by Altman: McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976).
Those roles cemented Duvall's career; with her gossamer-thin frame and toothy smile, she was the go-to actress for any role that called for an actress out of the ordinary.
But it was her appearance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining (1980) that, for many viewers, remains her most memorable role. In the movie, she and her husband, Jack (Nicholson), along with their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), move into a mountainside hotel as caretakers while it shuts down for the winter.
As Jack begins to exhibit signs of madness, Wendy becomes increasingly concerned for her own safety and her son's, though she seems to remain unaware of the underlying supernatural forces at work on her husband.
Though critics initially found her performance overbearing -- especially her shrieks as an ax-wielding Nicholson hunts them through the hotel halls -- it has been reevaluated over the years, especially as critics have come to understand the psychological strain of the film, and of working under the sometimes abusive treatment of the film's director, Stanley Kubrick.
"While Nicholson dials up his familiar manic mode as much as demanded, Shelley Duvall amplifies her neurotic quality to the extreme," Seongyong Cho wrote for rogerebert.com in 2023. "Her strenuous efforts here in this film deserve more appreciation, especially considering how Kubrick harshly treated her during the shooting."