The Shining Star Shelley Duvall Dies

Also a muse of director Robert Altman, the actress was 75 years old.

Heroine, alongside Jack Nicholson, from the legendary Shining by Stanley Kubrick, star of several gems of American cinema from the 70s, often by Robert Altman (Nashville, Three women, Popeye…), Shelley Duvall died Thursday, July 11, a few days after celebrating her 75th birthday, from complications related to diabetes.

“My dear, sweet, wonderful companion and friend has left us. She has suffered too much lately, she is free now. Fly away, beautiful Shelley” her husband, musician Dan Gilroy, told the Hollywood Reporter.

Shelley Duvall, who retired from film sets in 2002, had publicly spoken of her mental health issues. Cinema history will remember that she also suffered greatly on the set of Shiningthe perfectionist and tyrannical Stanley Kubrick made her live hell and pushed her to extremes, multiplying the takes to obtain the most intense performance possible from her. Shelley Duvall played Wendy Torrance, the wife of a failed writer, played by Jack Nicholson, soon taken mad and seeking to massacre his family. The actress's face trembling with fear has marked generations of spectators. Shortly after this shooting which had lasted many months, Shelley Duvall had shared the extreme hardness of this experience: “After a while, your body rebels. It tells you : “Stop doing this to me, I don’t want to cry from morning to night.” Sometimes the mere thought that I was going to have to spend my day crying made me cry.”

Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1949, Shelley Duvall was spotted by Robert Altman, who hired her to star in his film Brewster McCloud (1970). The leading director of the emerging New Hollywood had been seduced, as were soon the spectators, by her atypical physique and attitude, her thinness and her immense eyes which gave her a unique presence on the screen. The actress would quickly join the troupe of the nonconformist filmmaker, for large or small roles, in many of the most significant films of the time: the western John McCabe (1971), the gangster movie We are all thieves (1974), or the immense polyphonic country fresco Nashville, in 1975.

Two films mark the peak of their collaboration: first Three womenin 1977, a labyrinthine and psychological film halfway between Rivette and Lynch, in which Duvall plays opposite Sissy Spacek (another unforgettable face of the seventies) and which earned her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival; then Popeyethe adaptation into songs of the comic strip about the spinach-loving sailor, where she brought to life the character of Olive, the sailor's wife, opposite Robin Williams.

From the 70s to the 90s, we could also come across the actress in Annie Hall (1977) by Woody Allen (on the set of which she met the singer Paul Simon, who makes an appearance in the film and with whom she lived for two years), Bandits, bandits (1981) by Terry Gilliam, On edge (1995) by Steven Soderbergh or Portrait of a woman (1996) by Jane Campion.

In the 80s, she hosted children's shows, programs for which she sometimes received the assistance of leading directors such as Francis Ford Coppola or Tim Burton. The same Burton who directed her in one of her first short films, the famous Frankenweenie, in 1984. Shelley Duvall had recently come out of retirement to star in a low-budget horror film, The Forest Hills.