Shelley Duvall, the much-loved US character actor and star of films such as The Shining, Annie Hall and Popeye, has died four days after her 75th birthday.
Duvall died in her sleep of complications from diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas, according to Dan Gilroy, who had been her life partner since 1989.
Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter: “My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall made her name in a series of landmark 1970s classics, including seven films with the director Robert Altman, who first discovered her while she was in college in her hometown of Houston, Texas.
She made her debut in Brewster McCloud, as a teenage tour guide, before starring as a mail-order bride in McCabe & Mrs Miller in 1971. Other collaborations between the pair included Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians and 1977’s 3 Women as a fantasising health spa attendant, which many consider her finest work, and which won her the best actress prize at the Cannes film festival.
Duvall, said Altman, “was able to swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic, even beautiful.”
“I love him,” she told the New York Times in 1977, asked about the longevity of their relationship. “He offers me damn good roles. 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.”
She added: “I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’ Sometimes I find myself feeling self-centered, and then all of a sudden that bit of advice will pop into my head and I’ll laugh.”
Duvall remains perhaps best known for her role as the wife of Jack Nicholson’s axe-wielding author in The Shining (1980). The film had a famously gruelling 13-month shoot, with one scene in which Nicholson’s character torments Duvall’s with a baseball bat reportedly running to 127 takes.
Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end,” said Duvall in a 1981 interview with People magazine. “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”
She also appeared in two landmark comedies: 1977’s Annie Hall, as the vague Rolling Stone reporter who describes sex with Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer as “really a Kafkaesque experience … I mean that as a compliment” and in 1980 opposite Robin Williams in Altman’s live-action Popeye.
Her iconic rendition of the song He Needs Me was later repurposed by Paul Thomas Anderson for the 2002 romcom Punch-Drunk Love.
In 1981 she appeared in Terry Gilliam’s fantasy film Time Bandits; three years later she was in Tim Burton’s seminal comedy horror short Frankenweenie and in 1987, starred opposite Steve Martin in modern day Cyrano de Bergerac take, Roxanne.
As the decade progressed, Duvall increasingly devoted herself to producing children’s television, particularly focusing on new adaptations of classic fairytales, for which she was Emmy nominated and won a Peabody award.
She returned to acting only sporadically through the 1990s, most notably for supporting roles in Steven Soderbergh’s 1995 thriller The Underneath as well as Jane Campion’s Henry James adaptation The Portrait of a Lady the following year.
A 21-year break from the profession ended in 2022, when Duvall featured in low-budget horror The Forest Hills.
Duvall was open about her health struggles, appearing on US talk show Dr Phil 2016 to discuss her mental illness, saying: “I am very sick. I need help.” The episode was widely condemned for appearing to exploit a vulnerable older person.
In 2021, a fragile yet happy Duvall was interviewed in the Hollywood Reporter, and discussed the trauma she had felt working on The Shining, as well as in the aftermath of both the Dr Phil show and the 1994 earthquakes which destroyed much of her house.
Duvall met Gilroy, the former lead singer of Breakfast Club, in 1989, when they worked together on a children’s show. She had previously been married to the artist Bernard Sampson, and in a relationship with the musician Paul Simon, who she met while making Annie Hall.