The beloved, iconic actress Shelley Duvall, who made a name for herself in films like 3 Women (1977), Popeye (1980), and The Shining (1980), died Thursday at the age of 75. Her life partner since 1989, Dan Gilroy, told The Hollywood Reporter that Duvall died in her sleep of complications from diabetes.
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“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” Gilroy said. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall was born in Fort Worth, Texas on July 7, 1949, to her father, Bob, a cattle auctioneer who later became an attorney, and her mother, Bobbie, a realtor. She was the oldest of four children and her parents’ only daughter. When she was attending South Texas Junior College in Houston, studying to be a research scientist, she met director and screenwriter Robert Altman, who asked her if she’d like to be in a movie. She made her acting debut in 1970’s Brewster McCloud and worked with Altman, who became her mentor, on six more films.
In a 1985 interview with CNN, Duvall said she met Altman after she threw a party at her boyfriend’s house. Three men showed up and asked her to bring her boyfriend’s paintings to be seen by their friend, a “patron of the arts.” She said hadn’t studied acting at all, but Altman apparently saw something in her. “Years later, I asked him, ‘What was it, anyway? Why me?’ And he said, ‘I thought you were just so natural. I couldn’t beat you, so I hired you,’” she said.
Speaking to The New York Times in 1977, Duvall said she worked with Altman so often because “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.”
Unfortunately, Duvall’s sparkling career in Hollywood took on a different tone after she worked with Stanley Kubrick on The Shining. She continued to work but all but fled from the celebrity life in the mid-1990s, leaving behind her production company Think Entertainment, where she created children’s TV programming with A-list casts and earned two Emmy Award nominations, to hunker down in her home state of Texas. In 2016, she appeared on Dr. Phil and revealed that she was experiencing mental illness, which the show presented in a highly exploitative way.
For years after The Shining became a beacon of horror iconography, Duvall spoke candidly about her experience on set. In 1981, a year after the film was released, she told People that director Stanley Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end. I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”
In 2021, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch visited Duvall in Texas, where she reflected on her hellish experience filming the movie. She told Abramovitch that Kubrick cast her based on her performance in 3 Women (which won her the award for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival), specifically the scene when her character, Millie, has to deliver a stillborn baby with no medical assistance. “He said I was great at crying,” she revealed, and said she got the call from Kubrick himself, whom she had never met. Rather than sending her a script, he sent her the book on which the film is based—Stephen King’s The Shining—and told her to read it.
At the airport, before she boarded the plane to England, where the movie was set to film, her boyfriend at the time, Paul Simon, broke up with her—a terrible precursor to what would later be described by many as a grueling, abusive experience for Duvall. For the next 56 weeks, she lived alone in a flat by the studio, accompanied by two birds and a dog. The shooting schedule for The Shining was brutal, with Kubrick filming six days a week for up to 16 hours a day.
“[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard. And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult,” she told THR. To get to that emotional place, she would listen to sad songs or think about sad things, like how much she missed her loved ones. “But after a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled—I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”
During Abramovitch’s visit, he and Duvall watched the staircase scene in which she swings a bat at Nicholson as he threatens to kill her, which notoriously took an incredible number of takes to satisfy Kubrick. As she and Abramovitch watched, Duvall began to cry, saying, “[W]e filmed that for about three weeks. Every day. It was very hard. Jack was so good—so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing.”
There has always been a shroud of mystery around Duvall, especially since she walked away from her career. However, the impact Kubrick and The Shining had on her life has been mythologized to an extent that many feel is reductive of her career, her life, and her actual experiences. In reality, it seems there were several contributing factors to why she moved back to Texas. Movie offers began to dwindle; the 1994 Northridge earthquake did extensive damage to her California home (per THR); and she wanted to be closer to family after her brother was diagnosed with spinal cancer (per People).
According to People, Duvall was still happy to watch her films despite the harsh memories associated with The Shining. In February 2023, she told reporter Elaine Aradillas that when she finds one of her movies on cable, she’ll keep it on: “On one channel there is Popeye and another one The Shining. Boy, those are two different films. But in a way it’s like, ‘Gosh, I was great.’”
And she was. Duvall’s iconic performances will live on forever, especially in the hearts of millennials who grew up watching her children’s programming and later fell in love with her earlier, more adult-oriented films. Duvall skyrocketed into the spotlight with her star talent, iconic voice, and wide, wide eyes. Her fans can take comfort in knowing she was loved fiercely and protectively until the end, and we all send our condolences to Gilroy, her partner, and her brothers by whom she is survived: Scott, Stewart, and Shane.