What Happened To Shelley Duvall?
What Happened To Shelley Duvall?
Hello, I am Shelley Duvall, welcome to Faerie Tale Theatre. Fans were shocked when Shelley Duvall appeared on the Dr. Phil Show and made some disturbing admissions about her old co-star Robin Williams. She was the 1970s actress that audiences came to know and love for her distinctive look and odd eccentric characters. Her most famous role as Wendy Torrance in The Shining, however, might have pushed her over the edge, but there is no question about it, the wide-eyed girl was born to be a star. Duvall’s famous quirkiness wasn’t an act, she was born that way, and she definitely didn’t get it from her parents, who were real estate brokers and cattle auctioneers turned lawyers. She remembers being an artistic child bursting with energy, but that energy didn’t always have a good place to go, and her parents could barely keep up. She would rip around their house, knocking things over and leaving chaos wherever she went, and her mother eventually gave her the nickname manic mouse. As a child, Duvall never considered a career in entertainment despite her entertaining personality. In fact, she wanted to be a scientist, and at first, that’s what she pursued, but one gruesome moment changed everything.
One fateful day in biology class, her teacher had the students observe a vivisection of a monkey, and her gentle heart and stomach couldn’t take it. Once she decided that science wasn’t for her, she went on to study nutrition and diet therapy at South Texas Junior College. She then found a job selling cosmetics at a department store and put her distinctive looks to work as a model. It looked like she was going to lead a fairly quiet life, but then a chance encounter put her on a different path. In 1970, Duvall became engaged to and married an artist named Bernard Samson. To help showcase her fiance’s work, Duvall decided to throw a party, and by chance, three members of the crew for director Robert Altman’s film Brewster McCloud happened to be in attendance. They weren’t there scouting out her fiance’s artwork, but fascinated and enthralled by Duvall’s unique look, boundless energy, and hyper enthusiasm, the crew members devised a plan. They told Duvall to collect some of the paintings and present them to a group of art patrons, though unbeknownst to Duvall, the art patrons were director Robert Altman and producer Lou Adler. After this, her life would never be the same.
She left a lasting impression on Altman and Adler, and though neither of them cared much about the paintings, they couldn’t take their eyes off Duvall. After she finished her sales pitch, Altman and Adler dropped the ruse, told her that they were filmmakers, and asked her if she wanted to be in a movie. Despite her misgivings, she posed for a Polaroid and gave Altman her contact details, having no clue what she was in for. For the first six or seven years of her acting career, Duvall worked almost exclusively with Altman, becoming one of his favorite collaborators. Her quirks, effervescent personality, and unique looks endeared her to audiences, but not everyone was falling in love with her. Her marriage to Samson collapsed as her fame grew, and they divorced in 1974. In order to advance her career, Duvall reportedly started taking acting lessons at the famed Actors Studio in New York, but after just a few classes, she decided that it was too analytical and technical and that she preferred her freewheeling spirit. Her instincts were right, as she was a natural in front of the camera, and soon the world would know it. Duvall’s breakout performance came in 1977’s Three Women, and even though it was another Altman-directed film, Duvall was allowed to exercise her natural creative abilities. In addition to ad-libbing most of her lines, Altman credited Duvall with writing her character’s diary entries and decorating her room.
Even though Three Women was only a moderate commercial success, film critics and Hollywood insiders loved it, and more importantly, they loved her. Film critic Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice compared Duvall to a young Katharine Hepburn, and she snagged the award for best actress at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival. Shortly after she finished filming Three Women, Duvall met the singer and songwriter Paul Simon in New York, and they ended up living together, but this was no fairy tale romance. In a 1981 interview with Cosmopolitan, Duvall remembered her time with Simon in New York with sadness, noting that even though she was hanging out with the most sophisticated, glamorous people, she felt lost, bored, and depressed. She also gave up several career opportunities for Simon, including one particular role from Altman that caused a rift in their friendship. Realizing that she couldn’t continue living like this forever, she introduced Simon to her close friend Carrie Fisher, and the two hit it off. In the meantime, Duvall decided to return to the big screen, giving a tearful goodbye to Simon at the airport before heading off to star in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Duvall’s performance as Wendy Torrance in 1980’s The Shining would turn out to be one of her most enduring roles ever, but it didn’t come easily. The famously demanding director Stanley Kubrick wanted to get the best possible performance out of her, and he would do anything in order to accomplish that, including pushing Duvall past her breaking point. In order to help her get into character, Kubrick isolated her on set from her co-stars, and Jack Nicholson claimed that Kubrick picked on her more than anyone else, oftentimes losing his temper with her, berating her, and accusing her of wasting everyone’s time on set. The treatment had unexpected consequences, and Duvall revealed what it was like making The Shining, describing it as a grueling schedule of six days a week, twelve to sixteen-hour days, with only half an hour for lunch, for a year and one month. The role demanded that she had to be in hysterics all the time, and all of those tears came at a cost. More often than not, Kubrick would demand several retakes of highly dramatic scenes, and Duvall would naturally run out of tears, but not producing the waterworks when Kubrick yelled action wasn’t an option, so she walked around with a bottle of water to remain hydrated. Kubrick didn’t allow anyone on set to come to Duvall’s aid when he pushed her to her limits or beyond them. In the documentary Arena: Making The Shining, Kubrick’s daughter Vivian said that the director wanted Duvall to feel utterly hopeless because Kubrick had a vision for her performance and he didn’t care how she felt about it. Perhaps the best example of Kubrick pushing Duvall past her breaking point was the infamous baseball bat scene, where to really get Duvall to the point of exhaustion, Kubrick had her do 127 takes, the most for any scene in film history. Unsurprisingly, all that stress finally took its toll, and Duvall complained about nervous exhaustion and physical illness from the stress of filming with Kubrick. That wasn’t even the worst of her symptoms, as throughout filming Duvall was shedding her hair, and after filming wrapped, she went to Kubrick with the clumps of hair that had fallen out because of how he treated her. After everything she went through during the making of The Shining, Duvall didn’t even receive praise from critics or audiences; in fact, she received the worst honor in Hollywood for her portrayal of Wendy Torrance with a nomination for a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress. Thankfully, history was a little kinder than Kubrick was, and in time audiences learned all that Duvall had endured at Kubrick’s hands, causing one of the co-founders of the Golden Raspberries to feel so bad that they retracted the nomination. In spite of the way he treated her, Duvall still liked and respected Kubrick, and at the very least, Kubrick got what he wanted, as he was impressed by Duval’s performance in the final film.
After such a taxing experience with Kubrick, Duvall teamed up with Altman once again to make the 1980 film Popeye. Altman cast Duvall in the role of olive oil, a role that she had been born to play, as all throughout grade school Duvall’s classmates had teased her and called her olive oil. Once again, critics panned the film even though it was a box office success, but this time they heaped praise on Duvall, and famed film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Shelley Duvall is like a precious piece of china with a tinkling personality, looking and sounding like almost nobody else. Far from the shrieking and shrinking character of Wendy Torrance in The Shining, Duvall learned to love olive oil and embrace their similarities. Despite the fact that Olive is a cartoon, Duvall felt like she had more depth than any character she’d ever played. Switching gears entirely, Duvall began spending more time behind the camera, producing and narrating children’s and young adult shows, and it was actually through this work that she met her longtime boyfriend Dan Gilroy in 1989, imagining a life far away from Hollywood. After a devastating earthquake in 1994 rocked her Los Angeles home, Duvall returned to her home state of Texas, and by 2002 she had all but stopped any kind of work in the film and TV industry, disappearing from the public eye. When she finally reappeared, her fans barely recognized her. Sometime in 2016, Duvall agreed to appear on an episode of Dr. Phil about mental health, though what she may not have realized was that she would be the sole subject of the interview. During the show, a remarkably aged and unrecognizable Duvall made outlandish claims that had fans everywhere concerned about her mental state. While the cameras on the Dr. Phil show were rolling, Duvall made some disturbing admissions, claiming that her Popeye co-star Robin Williams, who had died two years earlier, was in fact still alive and not only that, but that he was shape-shifting. Sadly, that wasn’t the most outlandish claim she made, and while Duvall had always been eccentric, her claims on the Dr. Phil show were something else. In the interview, she went on to state that aliens had placed implants in her leg and that she was afraid of the Sheriff of Nottingham, further claiming that Hornets had attacked her spinal cord. The shocking interview left audiences aghast, and almost immediately after the episode aired, the show and its host received a flood of negative feedback. Duvall’s fans, who remembered her effervescent personality fondly, criticized the show for exploiting her at a vulnerable time in her life, and Vivian Kubrick, who had seen her suffering on the set of The Shining firsthand, rushed to her defense.
Something good did eventually come out of Duval’s appearance on Dr. Phil, as the acclaimed director Leerich had been searching for Duvall for years in order to complete a book he was writing on the making of The Shining. Thanks in part to her dramatic reappearance, Enrich tracked her down to a small town in Texas Hill Country. When he found her, Enrich showed Duvall pictures from the set of The Shining, noting that he was really curious to see how she would react and the stories that it might draw out of her. To his surprise, however, Duvall was lucid and not at all how she had seemed on Dr. Phil, though that’s not to say that she was doing all right. Enrich found that in between her somewhat manic ramblings, Duvall could converse for long, coherent stretches and conjure up the slightest detail about her life and her career. Additionally, she remained very proud of her accomplishments in Hollywood despite her unceremonious exit from the spotlight. In October of 2022, Duvall announced that she was ending her twenty-year retirement, and despite her setbacks, the actress decided to make her comeback in the independent horror film The Forest Hills. She passed away in July 2024 due to complications from diabetes, and an outpouring of tributes from writers, directors, and her fellow actors showed that despite her long absence, nobody had forgotten about Shelley Duvall. Her work lives on, still being discovered by new generations and still being poured over by those who consider her performances to be the stuff of legend. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe for more videos.
