Shelley Duvall, whose slender features and quirky personality made her one of the biggest movie stars of the 1970s and early ’80s, appearing in a string of films by director Robert Altman and, perhaps most memorably, opposite Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” died Thursday at her home in Blanco, Texas. She was 75.
A family spokesman said the cause was complications from diabetes.
Ms. Duvall had no plans for a career in film when she met Mr. Altman while he was making “Brewster McCloud” (1970); she had thrown a party to sell her husband’s art, and members of his film crew were there. Taken in by her, they introduced her to Mr. Altman, a director known for his eccentric films and offbeat casting. He immediately asked her to join the cast, despite her lack of training.
She said yes and went on to appear in five more Altman films: “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (1971), “Thieves Like Us” (1974), “Nashville” (1975), “Buffalo Bill and the Indians: or, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” (1976) and “3 Women” (1977). She also starred as Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams in Mr. Altman’s “Popeye” (1980).
Her work with Mr. Altman cemented her career. With her wiry frame, toothless smile and soft Southern accent, she was the go-to actress for any role that required an idiosyncratic ingénue. Her fans called her “Texas Twiggy”; the critic Pauline Kael, praising her understated onscreen appearance, called her “a female Buster Keaton.”
Ms. Duvall dated Paul Simon and Ringo Starr. She hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1977. Photos of her, often wearing a draped, sheer dress and holding a cigarette nearly as long and thin as she was, became an enduring image of celebrity life in the 1970s.
But it was her role as Wendy Torrance in “The Shining” (1980) that remains for many viewers her most memorable role. In the film, she and her husband, Jack (M. Nicholson), and their son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), move into a mountainside hotel as caretakers while it is closed for the winter.
As Jack begins to show signs of insanity, Wendy becomes increasingly concerned for her own safety and that of her son, even as she seems unaware of the underlying supernatural forces at work on her husband.
Critics initially found her performance excessive, particularly her piercing screams as Mr. Nicholson, armed with an axe, stalks them through the hotel corridors. She was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Actress, although Janet Maslin, in The Times, praised her Wendy “as an almost bizarre creature, her precocious banality making her terror all the more extreme.”
Ms. Duvall’s role has since been reassessed, especially as critics have come to appreciate the psychological strain of working under the sometimes difficult treatment of the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick.
What struck audiences at the time as a standard portrait of a hysterical woman — Stephen King, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, even called her role “misogynistic” — has become a stunningly realistic portrait of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship.
“While Nicholson taps into his familiar manic mode as much as necessary, Shelley Duvall amplifies her neurotic quality to the extreme,” Seongyong Cho wrote for rogerebert.com in 2023. “Her relentless efforts here in this film deserve to be more appreciated, especially considering how harshly Kubrick treated her during filming.”
The Razzies have officially rescinded his nomination in 2022.
It has long been claimed that working with Kubrick caused Duvall to leave Hollywood. In fact, she told the Times this year, she came to admire him, and in any case, she continued to act in the 1980s, including as one half of the doomed couple Vincent and Pansy, opposite Michael Palin, in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits (1981), and opposite Steve Martin in Roxanne (1987).
But she also found other pursuits in the film industry besides acting. In 1982, she founded Platypus Productions, which adapted classic children’s tales into one-hour television plays under the anthology title “Faerie Tale Theater.”
She used her many connections to round out the casting, including former partners Robin Williams, Bud Cort and Eric Idle. And, of course, she asked Mr. Altman to direct an episode.
Later, after founding another company, Think Entertainment, she produced horror-themed films for older children and adults under the title “Nightmare Classics.”
His work earned him new praise from viewers and industry insiders alike, at a time when many believed the expanding cable world needed better programming.
“For years I’ve been going to cable conventions,” Ms. Duvall told The Times in 1988, “and the cry I heard was for original programming. I want to help provide it.”
Shelley Alexis Duvall was born on July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth and grew up in the Houston area. Her father, Robert, was a livestock auctioneer turned attorney, and her mother, Bobbie Ruth (Massengale) Duvall, was a real estate agent. (She is not related to actor Robert Duvall.)
She married Bernard Sampson in 1970; they divorced in 1974. She is survived by her long-time partner, Dan Gilroy, and three younger brothers, Scott, Stewart and Shane.
Ms. Duvall grew up a voracious reader, particularly of horror classics, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James and Ambrose Bierce, which she would later turn into television programs for “Nightmare Classics.”
She aspired to go into science and “make great discoveries in food research to help mankind,” she told The Times in 1977. She studied nutrition at South Texas Junior College and sold cosmetics in a department store. She dropped out of school after witnessing a monkey vivisection and decided to find a more enjoyable career.
Her then-husband, Mr. Sampson, was an artist, and in 1970 she threw a party at their home in Houston to drum up interest in her work. Unbeknownst to her, Mr. Altman and his film crew were in town filming “Brewster McCloud,” and some of them attended the party.
They returned to the set, full of praise for their strange and captivating host.
“When I first met Bob Altman a few days later, he asked me, ‘Would you like to be in a movie?'” she told The Times in 1977. “I said, ‘But I’m not an actress,’ and he said, ‘Yes, you are.'”
Her early roles with Mr. Altman were in supporting roles, including a mail-order bride in “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” or in ensemble roles, such as in “Nashville.” But she took the lead in the enigmatic and critically acclaimed “3 Women,” opposite Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule, and won the best actress award at the Cannes International Film Festival for her performance.
By then, Mr. Altman and Ms. Duvall were a well-oiled machine, and he let her write about half of his dialogue herself.
“He has great confidence in me,” she said in the 1977 Times interview, “and he has trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t restrict me or intimidate me, and I love him.”
Ms. Duvall worked almost exclusively with Mr. Altman in the 1970s, with the exception of “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a 1976 film for PBS based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a small role in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977).
It was her work in “3 Women” that caught the attention of Mr. Kubrick, who was beginning to cast actors for “The Shining.”
“I like the way you cry,” she remembers hearing him say.
Kubrick was a notoriously strict director, often requiring dozens of takes for each scene during the making of The Shining, including 127 for a scene in which a terrified Wendy holds a baseball bat, ready to confront Jack. Throughout filming, Kubrick refused to give her water. This, coupled with off-screen footage from the film’s making, seems to reinforce the impression that his treatment of Ms. Duvall was borderline abusive.
But whatever Ms. Duvall’s feelings at the time, she later said she was grateful for Mr. Kubrick’s obsessive precision; it was, she said, the only way she could access the complex horror at the heart of Wendy’s character.
“He was very warm and friendly to me,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.
Although she continued acting into the 1980s, her roles were fewer and smaller. In addition to well-received films like “Time Bandits” and “Roxanne,” she appeared in “Frankenweenie” (1984), a Tim Burton short, and “The Underneath” (1995), a Steven Soderbergh crime thriller.
In her interview with The Times in April, Ms. Duvall attributed the decline of her career and her eventual move from Los Angeles to rural Texas to several causes, including the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which severely damaged her home, and a family health emergency.
But she also spoke of the cruel emptiness of Hollywood stardom, the way supposed friends can suddenly become enemies, and the way women prized for their youthful good looks can be unceremoniously discarded as they age.
“How would you feel if people were really nice and then all of a sudden they turned on you,” she snapped her fingers, “you’d never believe it unless it happened to you. That’s why you’re hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”
After several years of living happily away from the spotlight, her physical and mental health began to decline. Mr. Gilroy, her partner, told the Times that she had become paranoid and reclusive, even calling the FBI for protection.
In 2016, she appeared as a guest on “Dr. Phil.” The show was billed as an effort to help her, but she appeared deeply disturbed, her face puffy and her gray hair thin and disheveled. She insisted that Robin Williams, who had died two years earlier, was alive and “a shapeshifter.”
Ms. Duvall’s problems were real, but the episode was roundly criticized for showing a person with good days and bad days in the worst possible light. Subsequent interviews Ms. Duvall gave to the Times and The Hollywood Reporter offered a more nuanced picture.
And though in recent years Ms. Duvall has used a wheelchair to get around her home, she has appeared in another film, “The Forest Hills,” released last year. It’s a supporting role in a quirky independent horror film, but a fitting role for an actress who never intended to act.
“I took Lee Strasberg a few years ago because I’d heard great things about him, but I took two classes and it wasn’t for me,” she told Andy Warhol for a 1977 Interview magazine cover story. “That’s one of the pieces of advice Robert Altman gave me early on: never take a class and don’t take yourself seriously.”