When Shelley Duvall was cast to play Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), the film she would become most famous for, it was overwhelmingly the most mainstream movie she’d ever done — but more to the point, it was the most mainstream character. Duvall, who died July 11 at 75, had spent the better part of a decade playing vibrant kooks and eccentrics in Robert Altman movies (and in case you think “kook” sounds pejorative, there was never anything pejorative about it when Shelley Duvall played one). She had also rocked that cameo in “Annie Hall” as a Rolling Stone reporter who dates Alvy Singer and says, “Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience.”
But in “The Shining,” Duvall, with her feather voice and beaming doll-like features, was suddenly called on to incarnate the essence of normality. And she did it as if born to it. She played Wendy in long black lank hair, toning down her natural Texas drawl to something that sounded more neutral and Midwestern. The film presents Wendy as the earnest soul of traditional middle-class American womanhood, a homemaker who’s devoted enough to try and make a home out of the Overlook Hotel, a cavernous resort nestled in the Colorado Rockies. Her husband, Jack, played by a Jack Nicholson who looks like he can’t wait to get out of his box, plans to spend the winter squirreled away there, pounding on his typewriter as he tries to launch his career as a novelist. It’s up to Wendy to support his dream and take care of Danny, their five-year-old son.
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But that, of course, is not how it works out. As Jack starts to lose his marbles, turning crazy and violent as he battles the triple demons of writer’s block, alcohol and the ghosts of caretakers past, he turns on Wendy, blaming her for his problems, slowly coming at her up the stairway of the Overlook lobby, as she struggles to fend him off with a baseball bat. It’s in this scene that Duvall’s acting takes off, lifting the film to a register of cataclysmic fear.
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As Wendy, clutching that bat, confronts her lunatic husband, her face and body are crumpling into tearful terror. And the thing is, you believe every traumatized moment. It’s a famous piece of movie lore that Kubrick, a legendary perfectionist and passive-aggressive control freak, made Duvall do 127 takes of that scene, precisely because he was trying to break down her defenses. You could say that what he subjected Duvall to as a performer mirrored what the character was going through. It worked; you felt the very pulse of Wendy’s high-panic distress. Duvall would later testify that she spent days on the set of “The Shining” engulfed in a kind of protracted anxiety attack. Yet years later, she ultimately stood by the process. And the result was there for everyone to see. In “The Shining,” Shelley Duvall took “scream queen” acting and elevated it to the level of art.
Lest anyone think that her days of playing eccentrics were over, she starred, just six months after the release of “The Shining,” in Robert Altman’s “Popeye,” an early visionary/cracked comic-book musical. With goldfish eyes, pursed lips, and a Victorian knot of hair set off by her dainty clenched-fist pose of adoration, Duvall gave a performance as Olive Oyl that was so perfect it was almost a joke. As an actor, Duvall could seem naturally stylized, which made Olive a role she was born to play. Yet within all that, she found a reservoir of heart. The highlight of “Popeye” might be Duvall’s performance of “He’s Large,” in which Olive explains her devotion to the oversize Bluto with a girlish defiance that’s indelible.
And indelible, make no mistake, was the word for Shelley Duvall. She imprinted her presence upon you; once you’d seen her, you couldn’t forget her. It was Altman who first had that reaction. In 1970, a few months after “MASH” came out and made Altman the hottest director in Hollywood (a status that wouldn’t last long — he was far too independent an artist), he was shooting his next feature in Houston, a fantasy comedy called “Brewster McCloud,” when he met Duvall at a party and, encouraged by a handful of crew members, decided to cast her in the movie. She’d had no experience as an actor. What they were all reacting to was what you can only call Duvall’s being — the eyes that were like something out of anime, her rabbity two front teeth, and a quality that could make you laugh or break your heart: the softness of her gaze, the tender passive radiance with which she looked out at the world.
“Brewster McCloud” is a movie that even a lot of Robert Altman fans have never seen. It stars Bud Cort, in round spectacles, in a man-child performance that’s very much a precursor to what he would bring off a year later in “Harold and Maude.” But “Brewster McCloud” is the more delicate and humane pop fairy tale. And Duvall, as the girl who falls for Brewster, was unlike anyone seen onscreen before. She acted in her own rhythm, with that spaced-out singsong voice, creating a character so sweetly detached she seemed like a cracked angel.
After that, Altman kept finding a place for her — as one of the frontier prostitutes in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” or, in her first leading role, as the farm girl in “Thieves Like Us” who becomes romantically involved with Keith Carradine’s baby-faced killer. But the role of Duvall’s that I most treasure from this period is the one in my favorite movie of all time: “Nashville.” She played a groupie whose real name is Martha, but who gets off the plane in Nashville announcing that she’s now known as “L.A. Joan.” She has arrived to visit her dying aunt, and is met at the airport by her elderly uncle (Keenan Wynn), who she spends the entire movie ignoring. Because she’s really there to meet musicians. In “Nashville,” L.A. Joan says almost nothing, beyond flirtatious pickup phrases like “Gotta light?” But she keeps changing outfits and her whole look — she’ll literally pop into a restroom and come out looking like someone else, as if she were the Cindy Sherman of groupies. She’s almost like a silent-movie character, hovering on the edges of the action, but Duvall makes her a magical waif. It’s all about her aura.
“Nashville” came out in 1975, and it seemed to seal Duvall’s place as Altman’s most irresistibly unlikely actress/muse. But the best was yet to come. If you’ve never seen “3 Women” (1977), you must. It’s Altman’s one-of-a-kind redneck fusion of Tennessee Williams and “Persona,” and Duvall and Sissy Spacek make it a duet to remember. Spacek plays Pinky, the shy and naïve one, while Duvall is Millie, the annoying trash-fashionista chatterbox who becomes her roommate at the Purple Sage Apartments. They are opposites destined to drive each other to distraction (to the point that they begin to exchange identities), but Duvall, who took the best actress prize at Cannes for 3 Women,” plays Millie as a material-girl version of Blanche Dubois. It’s a stupendous performance, and it positioned her to become the movie star she did in “The Shining” and “Popeye.” The world was now ready for Shelley Duvall.
Maybe more than she was ready for the world. Going forward, Duvall took on any number of television roles, often in children’s programming. She became the host, narrator, executive producer and intermittent star of “Faerie Tale Theater,” a kids’ series on Showtime. All of which seemed to express something of her childlike nature. Yet her movie-star days were over almost before they began. She was a vital producer, shepherding several more series, but as an actor she retreated. And when it emerged that she had struggled with mental-health issues, notably during a 2016 episode of “Dr. Phil” that drew intense (and deserved) criticism for the perception that it had exploited Duvall, one felt a sadness for her that seemed linked, perhaps, to something that was there in her performances: a solitary quality masked by her sublime matter-of-fact quirkiness. Maybe Hollywood had crushed her; maybe she was simply a frail blossom who needed to escape its grip. “Quirky” is a word that long ago became banal, but Shelley Duvall’s great gift is that she took her quirkiness and made it a reflection of our normality. That’s because of how exquisitely it expressed her innocence, her devotion, her damage, and her grace.