The Miracle of Shelley Duvall

The story of Shelley Duvall’s rich and varied career as both an actor and a producer — which ended with her death on July 11, less than a week after her 75^th birthday — begins before the first movie she appears in. It begins, in a very real sense, with M*A*S*H, the 1970 picture in which director Robert Altman definitively broke his journeyman shackles and concocted a movie more effortlessly subversive than what tyro filmmakers a generation younger were then beginning to cook up. The comedy of a perpetually stressed team of medicos in the Korean War had outrageous sight gags often tied to blood spurts that Peckinpah wouldn’t conceive. It poked nasty fun at religious hypocrisy, sexual hangups, and pretty much any subject that it deigned to take notice of while making counterculture heroes of Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland in the roles of Trapper John McCintyre and Hawkeye Pierce. I was there, and trust me, in the summer of 1970 it was the only movie anybody talked about. In a time when every other movie aspired to set the industry on its ear, this one really did. 

So Altman, God bless his perverse heart, opted to follow it up with an absurdist Texas-set comedy Brewster McCloud, in which the title character aspires to slip the surly bonds of earth and become a birdman, flying around the enclosed Astrodome with self-built wings. He’s also tied to a series of murders involving strangulation and bird droppings. This movie did not come highly recommended by critics. In fact it infuriated the cadre that elevated M*A*S*H. (One of the kinder reviewers, the Times‘ Vincent Canby, regretted that the movie hadn’t “enough wit to sustain more than a few isolated incidents.”) Hence, it was largely unseen. Those who kept the faith (and 11-year-old me was among them) were treated to several unusual sights, including statuesque Sally Kellerman bathing nude in Houston’s Mecom Fountain, Stacy Keach in old-age makeup not unlike that which would be sported by Grampa several years later in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and most memorably, a lithe young woman with a prominent set of front teeth and hilariously plumped-up eyelashes who has a crush on our antihero.

She’d been spotted by the Texas-based producers of the movie, including longtime Altman crony Tommy Thompson, who advised Altman that he had to get a load of “this girl” when he arrived in Texas. Shelley Duvall wasn’t an actress, didn’t aspire to be an actress, but was affiliated with the local art scene; her boyfriend was a painter and her meeting with Altman was initially predicated on his not-genuine interest in buying some canvasses. Altman didn’t buy Duvall’s unaffectedness in their first meeting — “I thought she was just full of shit […] and I was really rude to her,” he recalled in an interview — but when he realized her wide-eyed Shelleyness was genuine, he put her in the movie, playing a tour guide and giving her character, Suzanne Davis, Duvall’s own initials. It’s a cheerful, what-you-see-is-what-you-get performance in which her unusual magnetism adds a dimension of sincere feeling to this sometimes snotty sendup of Americana. 

Was acting a suitable career for her? She didn’t quite know, but she was just entering her twenties and not much was going on. Altman cast her in a small role in 1971’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, an uncanny masterpiece that put him back in the good graces with the critical establishment and roiled the moviegoing zeitgeist almost as much as M*A*S*H had. She was a spectral presence as a young prostitute imported to a new brothel, and not much more than a presence, alas. Altman handed Duvall her first lead role with Thieves Like Us, a low key and galvanically tragic period piece in which prison escapee Bowie, a cocky but goofy Keith Carradine, romances Duvall’s Keechie, the chain-smoking, lank-haired daughter of a criminal associate. Keechie’s a girl who likes to play vaguely tough, but can’t contain an essential sweetness. Her smile lights up the room even as her eyes seem inclined to doubt every damnable thing in her small drab world. 

In the mammoth Altman ensemble piece Nashville. Duvall struts a different kind of stuff as “L.A. Joan,” who shows up at the airport from California in skintight multicolored fabrics that make her look like an exploded pastel pencil set. Ostensibly in town to visit a sick aunt, she immediately sets to tracking down and bedding down a variety of stars and wannabes without a thought in her head. As cartoonish as she frequently seems, she’s also genuinely sexy in an eccentric way. And her performance is expert: she tamps down her natural warmth to less than a nub. (She’s also quirkily hot in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, telling Allen’s Alvy Singer that a prior partner had called doing the deed with her a “Kafkaesque experience.”)

Her Altman apotheosis was in 1977’s Three Women, one of the director’s periodic purposeful enigmas. As chatterbox Millie, who can’t close a car door without having her usually bright yellow dress get caught in it, she entrances wide-eyed teen Pinky, played by Sissy Spacek. Spacek and Duvall were a potent combination: two unlikely ‘70s stars, neither possessing conventional movie-goddess “looks,” but emblematic of a certain nonconformity in cinematic icon-making. Genuine stars of the genuinely cosmic kind, you could say. 

Sexiness was entirely denied her in her role as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of The Shining.  Wendy, another chain-smoker, dresses loosely and frumpily, and while the spark has clearly gone out of her marriage with failed novelist Jack well before they hie to the Overlook Hotel for a traumatic winter, there’s something in Wendy’s initial best-foot-forward attitude when speaking to child doctor Anne Jackson early in the film that suggests how she might have been swept off her feet by a quasi-literary charmer of the Torrance kind before little Danny came along. 

The ultimately terrified character is one of Duvall’s most virtuosic performances and also, paradoxically, a rather narrow one. Footage of her conferring with Kubrick on the set shows the furrow-browed director worrying over her every reaction, fretting it might look “phony.” In an interview with the BBC a year after the movie came out, she reflected on his method: “I had never done, say, more than 15 takes in my life. So it was a great change for me to do so many. After you do a certain number, it sort of goes dead. And five more takes or so and then it revives itself, and then you know the scene like the back of your hand and you can make no mistakes with it. And you forget all reality other than what you’re doing. And it’s like a miracle, it comes out better than it did before.”

In that interview clip, Duvall scarcely appears traumatized by her experience. In another interview with the critic Michel Ciment in the same year, 1981, she fondly recalls playing chess with Kubrick on the set: “He handicapped himself, gave me his queen — and the bastard still won.” Nevertheless, the urban myth persists that Kubrick’s treatment of her during the making of The Shining precipitated some mental health crises that shook Duvall up in the early part of this century — crises that she by many accounts bounced back from in recent years. The myth doesn’t merely slander Kubrick; it misrepresents the dynamic on the set of The Shining, and misrepresents the wonderful totality of Duvall’s career, and it insults Duvall’s intelligence, professionalism, and acting skill. 

Duvall went straight from the England set of The Shining to Malta, to play what some consider the character she was born to play: Olive Oyl, in Altman’s stoned immaculate live-action musical of Popeye, starring Robin Williams in the title role. Paul Dooley, who plays Wimpy in the picture, told me in an interview that when Duvall arrived she was more concerned about Kubrick’s treatment of senior actor Scatman Crothers on The Shining set and complained not at all about her experience. A splendidly whimsical film with hidden depths — it’s not for nothing Paul Thomas Anderson grafted Duvall’s standout musical number “He Needed Me” for a particularly aching scene in Punch Drunk Love — Popeye’s stature increases yearly and will continue to do so. 

As wonderful as Fred Schepisi’s 1987 Cyrano De Bergerac modernization Roxanne is, it feels like, well, Duvall’s first “normie” movie, with Shelley in a second-banana role as Steve Martin’s helpful god-sister. Much of her ‘80s was spent as creator and executive producer of the exhilarating children’s television show Faerie Tale Theatre, which she got the idea for while filming Popeye. She attracted a fantastic eclectic array of talent to work on the show, including some Pythons (she has a hilarious cameo in Terry Gilliam’s 1981 Time Bandits, made right after Popeye) and Roger Vadim, not a man known for family-friendly work who nevertheless did a fine job adapting a “Beauty and the Beast” variant. While her appearances on camera became more infrequent, she never wore out her welcome. One would have liked to see her go out in a more decisive picture than the yet-to-be released horror item The Forest Hills. But what we’ve got is incredibly sustaining, enigmatic, worthwhile. There was no one like her. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the upcoming The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.