Shelley Duvall, 75, an American actress best known for her roles in The Shining, Annie Hall, and Nashville, has died.
Her partner, Dan Gilroy, confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend has left us.” She has been subjected to much too much agony recently; she is finally free. “Fly away, lovely Shelley,” he added, according to the site.
Gilroy claimed she died of diabetic problems while sleeping at her Texas home.
Duvall’s other film credits include the 1977 drama 3 Women, directed by Robert Altman, for which she received the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress prize and was nominated for a Bafta.
Three years later, she played Olive Oyl alongside Robin Williams in Altman’s musical adaptation of Popeye.
However, Duvall went out of popularity in Hollywood and was absent for two decades until returning in 2023’s The Forest Hills.
Duvall’s wide brown eyes and eccentric personality made her a memorable and captivating presence.
She started her career and collaboration with Altman in the 1970 dark comedy Brewster McCloud, and the two reconnected for McCabe and Mrs Miller in 1971.
After shooting her role as a lady who falls for a 1930s bank robber in their next film, Thieves Like Us, Altman informed her, “I knew you were good, but I didn’t know you were great.”
She said the statement was “the reason I stuck with it and became an actress”.
The director persisted with her, once remarking she “was able to swing all sides of the pendulum: charming, silly, sophisticated, pathetic, even beautiful”.
Altman cast her again in 1975’s Nashville, a parody of American culture, politics, and country music.
In their second collaboration, 3 Women, Duvall played a gregarious, trend-following health spa attendant. According to Anne Billson of The Guardian, it was her finest part and “quite simply one of the greatest performances of the 1970s”.
Meanwhile, in 1977, Duvall portrayed Pam, a Rolling Stone reporter who goes on a date with Woody Allen’s Alvy in Annie Hall.
Her most well-known part was perhaps Wendy, the wife of Jack Nicholson’s menacing hotel caretaker in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece The Shining.
Filming was a slog. “I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week,” she told me once.
Following that, Duvall’s cinematic roles included Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and Roxanne, starring Steve Martin.
She also founded her own production businesses and produced and presented the popular 1980s children’s television program Faerie Tale Theatre.
Her acting jobs dwindled in the 1990s, with Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady reigning supreme, and she disappeared from the public eye in 2002.
The New York Times ascribed her apparent absence to the aftermath of a 1994 earthquake that wrecked her Los Angeles house, as well as the stress of her brother’s cancer diagnosis.
In May, she told the press that her protracted absence from the screen was due to a fickle film business. “I was a star.” I had lead parts. People believe it is just the result of aging, but this is not true. “It’s violence,” she said.
When asked to clarify, she remarked, “How would you feel if people were really nice and then suddenly turned on you?”You wouldn’t believe it unless it happened to you. That’s why you’re wounded; you can’t believe it’s true.”
Concerns about her health were raised when she appeared on the TV talk program Dr. Phil in 2016 and said, “I’m extremely unwell. “I need help.”
She reportedly described getting communications from a “shapeshifting” Robin Williams after his death, as well as demonic entities plotting to destroy her, according to the article.
Gilroy told the New York Times that at the time, she had become “paranoid and just kind of delusional”.
When the publication asked why she consented to return to the screen in The Forest Hills, she said, “I wanted to act again.” And then this man kept phoning, so I finally did it.”
What was Shelley Duvall in?
We honor the life and work of Shelley Duvall, best known for her appearances in The Shining, Annie Hall, and Popeye.
Where is Shelley Duvall now?
Shelley Duvall, the actress best known for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” and other Robert Altman films, died. She was 75. The two-time Emmy nominee, who had mainly left Hollywood in the late 1990s, died Thursday of diabetic complications at her Blanco, Texas, home.
