Shelley Duvall, cult star of The Shining, dies at 75

Shelly Duvall, the actor best known for her collaborations with Robert Altman and her starring in The Shining, has died at the age of 75.

Duvall was first discovered by the team of director Robert Altman while attending junior college in Texas in the late 1960s – this was the beginning of a long and fruitful creative partnership. Duvall and Altman made several films together, many of which are considered among the best of the 1970s: these include McCabe and Mrs Miller, a neo-Western in which she plays a widow turned reluctant sex worker; Nashville, in which she plays a mischievous and happy-go-lucky young groupie; the psychological thriller, Three Women, and Popeye, in which she starred as the titular character’s love-interest, Olive Oyl.  

Duvall possessed a unique beauty, but what really set her apart was the diversity of her performances – she was always a character actor as much as a leading lady: sometimes fragile and vulnerable, at other times intense, at other times sexy and cheeky. As Altman once said, she was “able to swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic, even beautiful.”

Duvall’s most famous role is still probably as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – a woman trapped in a nightmarish situation with a husband who is abusive from the very beginning and only becomes more violent as the supernatural starts seeping in. This was a notoriously difficult shoot – according to legend, Stanley Kubrick forced her to film the iconic scene where she hits Jack Nicholson with a baseball hat over 127 times – and her performance was met with mixed reviews at the time. In one of the worst decisions in Hollywood history, she was even nominated for ‘worst actress’ Razzie award. But history has vindicated her – very few people would make that argument today. 

Duvall’s performance is powerful and intense, but she also brings a gentleness to the role which makes Wendy’s predicament all the more horrifying and heartbreaking. Thanks in part to Duvall, what might have been simply a horror film about ghosts became a harrowing and all too real portrait of domestic violence. Stephen King – who wrote the book on which The Shining is based – described Duvall’s performance as “really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on screen” on the basis she screamed too much, a suggestion which I think is both wrong and in itself a little sexist: wouldn’t you be a little bit emotional if your husband was bursting through a door to murder you with an axe? Some people have alleged in recent years that the highly-charged quality of her performance is only due to her effectively being abused on set by Kubrick himself, but this explanation denies her agency and talent as an actor. However unpleasant the experience of filming The Shining might have been, she channelled it into something timeless.