TV & Movies

Beyond the Overlook: Revisiting Shelley Duvall’s 17 Most Bewitching Screen Roles

Shelley Duvall
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

Her wide-eyed terror in The Shining (1980)—Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece in which she played Jack Nicholson’s wife—is the first image that comes to mind when we think of Shelley Duvall. However, the late Texan actress, who passed away in her sleep on July 11 at the age of 75 due to severe diabetes, had a much broader film career.

For one thing, there was her special collaboration with another master of cinema, Robert Altman. Altman, who essentially discovered her, cast Duvall as Millie in the acclaimed drama Three Women (1977). This tragicomic and semi-improvised role—which saw her play an employee at a seniors’ spa in the California desert, inviting a colleague, played by Sissy Spacek, to share her apartment—cemented her status as an actress to watch, won her the best-actress award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

Shelley Duvall in Three Women, 1977

Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

Duvall’s first encounter with Robert Altman took place at a party organized for her then-boyfriend, artist Bernard Sampson, in 1969, when she was 20. The director went on to cast her in Brewster McCloud, her first movie, where she showed a natural talent (despite some youthful awkwardness). In the following years, she would take parts in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), all also under Altman’s direction. “He offers me damn good roles,” she said of the director in 1977. “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. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”

In Thieves Like Us, 1974

Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

Before the aforementioned Three Women, Woody Allen also noticed Duvall, and cast her in his masterpiece Annie Hall (1977), starring Diane Keaton. Although much of her performance was cut during editing, she left a strong impression as Pam, a sharply ironic Rolling Stone journalist. Then, in 1979, Duvall was summoned by the intellectually formidable Stanley Kubrick for the film that made her internationally famous: The Shining.

Making that movie profoundly affected her, severely testing her mental resilience. Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end,” Duvall told People magazine in 1981. “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”

Shelley Duvall in The Shining, 1980

Photo: Getty Images

Once she had escaped the Overlook Hotel, Duvall made her seventh and final film with Altman, Popeye (1980), playing Olive Oyl (with Robin Williams as her spinach-scarfing husband). She then starred in Terry Gilliam’s 1981 black comedy Time Bandits before her appearances on the big screen sharply declined—although she continued to work with notable directors. These included Tim Burton (Frankenweenie, 1984), Steven Soderbergh (The Underneath, 1995), and Jane Campion (The Portrait of a Lady, 1996). Her final film role came in 2023, in Scott Goldberg’s The Forest Hills.

Here, we celebrate Shelley Duvall’s exceptional life in images:

  • Shelley Duvall
    Photo: Getty Images
    1/17

    As Suzanne Davis in Brewster McCloud, 1970

  • Shelley Duvall
    Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
    2/17

    As Keechie in Thieves Like Us, 1974