The sad news came down earlier today that actress Shelley Duvall died in her sleep of complications related to diabetes. She was 75.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” Dan Gilroy, her life partner, said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall was one of the most celebrated and accomplished actresses of the Seventies. Director Robert Altman launched her career by giving her one of the lead roles in his 1970 classic Brewster McCloud. He continued to work with her in the years that followed in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, and 3 Women. Woody Allen gave her an opportunity to show off her comic chops in 1977’s Annie Hall, three years before she reunited with Altman to portray Olive Oyl alongside Robin Williams in Popeye.
But she left her largest pop culture footprint right before Popeye when Stanley Kubrick cast her as Wendy Torrance in his adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining. It was a long, punishing shoot where Duvall’s character was in a state of hysteria for much of the time.
“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable,” Duvall told Roger Ebert in December of 1980. “Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character, I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month, and there must be something to Primal Scream therapy because after the day was over and I’d cried for my 12 hours … After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to mention it, it seemed like. The reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t there.”
One of the most notorious scenes takes place about midway through the movie when she discovers that the novel her husband has been working on is merely “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy” written over and over again. (This is a Kubrick invention that wasn’t in the actual King novel.) She is forced to defend herself with a baseball bat as he lunges towards her. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Nicholson snarls. “Wendy, darling, light of my life. I’m not going to hurt you. You didn’t let me finish my sentence. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to bash your brains in. I’m going to bash them right the fuck in.”
According to Kubrick lore, they shot this scene 127 times. And according to Duvall lore, Kubrick’s harsh treatment of her on the set — chronicled in Vivian Kubrick’s documentary Making The Shining — contributed to mental health struggles that the actress experienced later in life. But Duvall always insisted this was simply not true. Earlier this year, she told the New York Times that she had fond memories of eating McDonald’s with Kubrick and playing chess with him. Never once did she pin any blame on him for issues she experienced decades after the shoot.
She also said she was stunned by the finished movie. “There were scenes I didn’t watch being filmed,” she said. “You know that scene with the two little girls at the end of the hallway, and then they step apart? And you see what’s behind them? That was scary, very scary.”
Many critics of the time were underwhelmed by Duvall’s performance in the movie. She was even nominated for Worst Actress at the inaugural Golden Raspberry Awards in 1981, though Brooke Shields walked away with the dubious honor for her role in The Blue Lagoon. (John J. B. Wilson rescinded the nomination in 2022 after learning how Kubrick treated her on the set.) And Stephen King famously didn’t like the movie much either. “It’s so misogynistic,” he told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I mean, Wendy Torrance is just presented as this sort of screaming dishrag.”
Most movie buffs today disagree with the film critics of 1980 and King himself. The movie is seen as a horror masterpiece, and Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy Torrance is celebrated. Watch the “gimme the bat” scene one more time. Try to envision going through that emotional ordeal 127 times. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Duvall pulling it off.
