Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in promotional still from Nashville
From Wikimedia Commons
The Queen's Film Society mourns the loss of Shelley Duvall, Texas native and cinema legend. She worked with a number of great filmmakers—Terry Gilliam, Joan Micklin Silver, Woody Allen, Tim Burton, Fred Schepisi, Stanley Kubrick, and Jane Campion, to name just a few--but was largely associated with New Hollywood director Robert Altman, who discovered her when he was in the Lone Star State filming that great Houston screwball comedy, BREWSTER MCCLOUD. Altman’s staff members met her by chance at a party and were so taken with her, despite the fact that she had never acted before, that they encouraged her to audition for the director. Once cast, she appeared as a spacy Astrodome tour guide who nearly steals the film away from its large ensemble of eccentric characters.
Altman would cast Duvall in six additional films, including the legendary MCCABE AND MRS MILLER, NASHVILLE, and 3 WOMEN, the latter showcasing what may be her greatest performance as a deceptively shallow young woman with an unexpressed core of rage and fear hidden behind a banal facade. Of course, the Altman film she's best known for is POPEYE, in which she played Olive Oyl, but it was another early 80s film secured her place in the pop culture firmament, THE SHINING, although her performance was initially controversial. Steven King, author of the novel upon which the Stanley Kubrick film is based, hated her performance, and it earned Duvall the ignominy of a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for 1980. However, her performance, like the film itself, has been positively reappraised in recent years. As a number of people now point out, Duvall’s dimwitted affect and hollow line readings as Jack Nicholson’s beleaguered wife, Wendy Torrance, contributes to a spot-on portrait of a character suffering from PTSD, and who is now disassociating from the reality of a long abusive marriage, which the film suggests had been toxic long before the Torrance family moved into the Overlook hotel. Duvall may or may not have been aware of this subtext of trauma threaded throughout the film, likely it was Kubrick who pushed her to perform in that way, but the result stands now as a brilliant portrait of a haunted woman.
Of course, there is much more one can say. Duvall was the producer of the legendary television anthology FAERIE TALE THEATER, which gave us Roger Vadim’s BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, Tim Burton’s ALADDIN, and Francis Ford Coppola’s RIP VAN WINKLE, among others, as well as a number of subsequent television series. She also worked to promote the visions of struggling artists, like the Winnipeg-based avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin, by appearing in their low budget films, surely for less money than she could have made staying in LA and just cashing in on easy money offers.
Duvall was truly unique and always came across as an authentic and likable person up on the screen (well, she wasn't exactly likable in NASHVILLE, though she’s still brilliant in it). She was, however, someone most of us would have loved to have had as a friend.
