Fascinating Shelley Duvall

Altman cast Duvall in another half-dozen features, and for Ty Burr, “she was almost unbearably touching as a Depression-era girl who goes on the lam with lover Keith Carradine” in Thieves Like Us (1974). In Popeye (1980), “Duvall gave a performance as Olive Oyl that was so perfect it was almost a joke,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw suggests that Altman “found in her those easy, unforced performances and line-readings that lent texture, sexuality, and her own kind of innocent mystery to his films.” Anne Billson, who’s written up the Guardian’s rankings, calls her turn as Millie Lammoreaux, a nurse at a California resort, in 3 Women (1977) “quite simply one of the greatest performances of the 1970s.”

“It’s to Altman’s credit that he can make a potentially off-putting figure like Millie, played by an actor who often seemed (fascinatingly) disconnected from reality, into someone we can empathize with,” wrote Michael Koresky in 2011. “But it’s Duvall who arouses our compassion. At times, you want to slap her to wake her up from her self-mythologizing (she imagines herself something of a debutante, and often speaks of men throwing themselves at her—contrary to what we see onscreen), but Duvall, with her Breck-girl curl and sunshine-colored dresses, cuts such a likably wacky figure that we can’t help but accept Millie in all her unreality.”

Joan Micklin Silver directed Duvall and Veronica Cartwright in Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1976), an adaptation for PBS of a 1920 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Reviewing the forty-five-minute film for the New York Times, Richard Eder was not won over, but he did find that the two lead performances made up “for a good deal. Shelley Duvall, as Bernice, is long, gawky, with watery eyes, frizzy hair, and an unhappy mouth. And yet she manages allure when she begins to practice it.”

In Annie Hall (1977), Duvall’s spacey Rolling Stone reporter told Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer that sex with him was “a Kafkaesque experience”—a “compliment” in her book—and as Pansy in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), she got to exclaim to Michael Palin’s Vincent, “Oh, the way you leapt to my chamber, so full of . . . of . . . manliness!” Duvall was Steve Martin’s friend and confidant in Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne (1987), a countess in Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady (1996), and an ostrich farmer in Guy Maddin’s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). “What an astonishingly warm and wonderful person she was!” Maddin wrote just a few days ago. “Pure delight, generous with laughter and stories (Kubrick! Altman!), and alarmingly friendly with everyone she met.”

Stanley Kubrick famously put Duvall through the wringer during the thirteen months he took to shoot The Shining (1980). Terrorized by Jack Nicholson’s crazed writer, her Wendy Torrence cries in disbelief, lets loose guttural screams, and frantically scrambles to save her son’s life. “Duvall’s admittedly odd performance has always been part of the uncanny, handmade charm of The Shining,” wrote Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri in 2019. “Wendy is clearly an abused woman. Watch the way she hesitates before telling a pediatrician, early in the film, that Jack once accidentally dislocated their young son Danny’s shoulder during a drunken rage . . . It’s the unease of someone who is petrified that merely mentioning such an event to a stranger might somehow animate the darkness again. It’s a vision of trauma, and Duvall nails it.”

As a producer of television movies and anthology series such as Faerie Tale Theatre, Duvall had the clout to cast such luminaries as Gena Rowlands, Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Teri Garr, Jeff Bridges, Anjelica Huston, Carol Kane, Elliott Gould, and Malcolm McDowell. On the set of the Disney Channel movie Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme (1990), she met Dan Gilroy, a member of the early Madonna band Breakfast Club, and they remained steadfast partners through a difficult period for Duvall in 2010s and better days in the 2020s.

Before meeting Duvall for a 2021 profile for the Hollywood Reporter, Seth Abramovitch spoke with Lee Unkrich, the director (Toy Story 3) and author (Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining) whose assessment of Duvall at the time would be confirmed in Abramovitch’s piece: “Yes, she could be gripped by anxiety attacks or meander into unsettling descriptions of alien-surveillance programs. But she also could converse for long, coherent stretches and conjure up the slightest details about her life and of her career, of which she remains very proud.”

“I honestly had no idea how the story would be received,” wrote Abramovitch on Thursday. But “thankfully, readers found it, and they got it . . . Everyone, it turns out, loves Shelley Duvall.”