Shelley Duvall, a beguiling face of 1970s film, dies at 75

Beginning in 1970, when she made her screen debut in Robert Altman’s black comedy “Brewster McCloud,” Ms. Duvall established herself as one of the most versatile and distinctive performers of the “New Hollywood” era. She had no acting training or experience, but it hardly seemed to matter: At a time when Altman and other directors were making personal, idiosyncratic films that ran counter to the studio mold, she represented a new kind of leading lady, winning over viewers with her doe eyes, lilting voice and naturalistic style.

“There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone,” film critic Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker, reviewing Altman’s 1980 film “Popeye.” Ms. Duvall, who starred opposite Robin Williams as the cartoon-strip character’s exasperated love interest Olive Oyl, “may be the closest thing we’ve ever come to a female Buster Keaton,” she added. “Her eccentric grace is like his — it seems to come from the inside out.”

Ms. Duvall started her career working almost exclusively with Altman, becoming a staple of his dialogue-rich, ensemble-driven movies. She played a mail-order bride in the western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), the mistress to a bank-robbing Keith Carradine in “Thieves Like Us” (1974), the wife of President Grover Cleveland in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976) and a distracted young groupie in “Nashville” (1975), a rollicking portrait of celebrity culture, presidential politics and country and gospel music that was praised as one of the year’s best films.

She received additional acclaim for Altman’s “3 Women” (1977), a dreamlike psychological drama — also starring Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule — that brought her the best actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Her character, Millie Lammoreaux, works at a senior center in the California desert and passes the time paging through magazines, collecting recipes that she organizes by cooking time.

“I put so much of myself into Millie, especially the parts I don’t care to see, all the vanities and the mundane things, such as Millie’s fondness for tuna‐melt sandwiches, and Scrabble, and the color yellow,” Ms. Duvall told the New York Times, estimating that she wrote about half the character’s lines herself.

The film built to an agonizing scene in which Millie is forced to deliver a stillborn baby. Ms. Duvall later said that her eerie, unsettling performance inspired director Stanley Kubrick to cast her as Wendy Torrance, the terrorized wife and mother in “The Shining” (1980). “I like the way you cry,” he told her in a phone call.

Based on a best-selling novel by Stephen King, “The Shining” opened to mixed reviews, with some critics dismissing Ms. Duvall’s performance as awkward, even cartoonish. But the film has since been hailed as a horror classic, with admirers defending her portrayal of an abused and traumatized spouse, trying to survive as her husband (played by Nicholson) loses his mind while working as the caretaker of a Colorado hotel.

By many accounts, the film’s production was as nightmarish as its story. The movie took 56 weeks to shoot, according to the Hollywood Reporter, — an extraordinarily long time that resulted partly from a fire that required the Overlook Hotel set to be rebuilt, and partly from the director’s exacting approach. Kubrick had his actors run through dozens of takes, including for shots in which Ms. Duvall was shown crying and running through the hotel, waving a baseball bat at her demonic husband or carrying her young son (Danny Lloyd) in her arms.

“That was a life experience like the Vietnam War probably was for veterans,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, looking back on the production. “It was grueling — six days a week, 12- to 16-hour days, half an hour off for lunch, for a year and one month. The role demanded that I cry for, whew, at least nine of those months. Jack had to be angry all the time, and I had to be in hysterics all the time.”

Later in life, Ms. Duvall was quick to note that she had happy memories from the set, where she and Kubrick would play chess in between scenes. But she also noted that the experience took a toll.

“After a while, your body rebels,” she told the Reporter in 2021. “It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it.”

The oldest of four children, Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth on July 7, 1949, and grew up in Houston. Her father was a cattle auctioneer-turned-lawyer, and her mother worked in real estate.

Early on, there were few signs Ms. Duvall would go into acting. Performing Joyce Kilmer’s short poem “Trees” at a sixth-grade talent contest, she stumbled over the words, left the stage in tears and declared that she would never show her face at school again.

“I heard my parents outside my closed bedroom door that night,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “saying, ‘Well, I guess she’s just not talented.’ Isn’t that a classic?”

Ms. Duvall vowed that she would become a scientist, and was a straight-A student until her junior year of high school, when she discovered “emotions and boys.” Her grades suffered, and she went on to attend a local junior college, taking classes in nutrition and diet therapy, before dropping out and getting a job selling cosmetics at a Foley’s department store.

Around 1970, she met a couple of Altman’s crew members at a Houston party for her boyfriend, artist Bernard Sampson. Dressed in patched jeans and a Mexican blouse, with bells jingling around her waist, she showed off Sampson’s paintings, trying to interest the visitors in a sale. They set up a meeting with other Altman associates, she told Interview magazine, where they passed on the art but asked if she wanted to be in a movie.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no, a porno film,’ because I’d been approached for that when I was 17 in a drugstore.”

The film was “Brewster McCloud,” in which she played an Astrodome tour guide who hooks up with a reclusive, flight-obsessed young man (Bud Cort) trying to build a pair of wings. It kicked off a happy and fruitful collaboration with Altman, whom she nicknamed “Pirate” because of his swashbuckling appearance. “His first and only piece of real advice was never to take myself seriously,” she said.

Around that same time, Ms. Duvall married Sampson. They moved to Los Angeles and divorced after four years. She later lived in New York with singer-songwriter Paul Simon; according to People magazine, they met while they were both working on Woody Allen’s 1977 film “Annie Hall,” in which Ms. Duvall had a small role as a Rolling Stone writer. (“Sex with you is a really Kafkaesque experience,” she tells Allen’s neurotic protagonist.)

Ms. Duvall later had supporting roles in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” (1981), Steven Soderbergh’s “The Underneath” (1995), Jane Campion’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (1996), and “Roxanne” (1987), a “Cyrano de Bergerac” retelling starring Steve Martin.

Increasingly, she focused on producing over acting. Drawing on her love of illustrated children’s books (she owned about 3,000, according to a Washington Post report), she launched children’s anthology shows, lovingly re-creating classic stories on her series “Faerie Tale Theatre,” which premiered on Showtime in 1982. The show’s episodes were directed by filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton; Williams, her “Popeye” co-star, starred in the pilot as the Frog Prince.

Ms. Duvall received two Emmy nominations as a producer of two follow-up shows, “Tall Tales & Legends” and “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.” While playing Little Bo Peep on another children’s project, the Disney Channel movie “Mother Goose Rock ’n’ Rhyme,” she met and fell in love with actor and musician Dan Gilroy, who became her partner of 35 years.

In addition to Gilroy, survivors include three brothers.

Beginning in the early 2000s, Ms. Duvall stepped away from acting and retreated from public life, inspiring rumors and speculation about what had happened to her. She made a rare appearance in 2016, when she was interviewed on the talk show “Dr. Phil,” discussing her struggles with mental health. “I’m very sick. I need help,” she said, before issuing bizarre statements about evil forces and messages from beyond the grave.

The talk-show episode was widely criticized as exploitative. In its wake, Ms. Duvall vanished again from the spotlight, returning to her home in the Texas Hill Country. She appeared on-screen one last time in “The Forest Hills,” a 2023 indie horror film co-starring Edward Furlong.

The New York Times reported in April, in a profile of Ms. Duvall, that her extended hiatus from acting seemed to have been caused by “the emotional impact of two events: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged her Los Angeles home, and the stressful toll of one of her brothers falling ill, which prompted her return to her native Texas three decades ago.”

Ms. Duvall also seemed pained by the trajectory of her career. “I was a star; I had leading roles,” she told the newspaper, shaking her head. “People think it’s just aging, but it’s not. It’s violence.”

“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime, they turn on you?” she continued. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”