Beginning in 1970, when she made her film debut in Robert Altman’s black comedy “Brewster McCloud,” Ms. Duvall established herself as one of the most versatile and distinctive performers of the “New Hollywood” era. She had no acting training or experience, but that hardly seemed to matter: At a time when Altman and other directors were making personal, idiosyncratic films that flouted the studio mold, she represented a new kind of leading lady, winning over audiences with her doe eyes, lilting voice and naturalistic style.
“There are no ancestors or influences that could explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she seems to owe nothing to anyone,” wrote film critic Pauline Kael in the New Yorker, reviewing Altman’s 1980 film “Popeye.” Ms. Duvall, who starred opposite Robin Williams as the cartoon character’s exasperated love interest, Olive Oyl, “may be the closest thing we have to a female Buster Keaton,” she added. “Her eccentric grace is like his — it seems to come from within.”
Ms. Duvall began her career almost exclusively with Altman and became a regular in his dialogue-heavy, ensemble-driven films. She played a mail-order bride in the Western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” (1971), the mistress of bank-robber Keith Carradine in “Thieves Like Us” (1974), the wife of President Grover Cleveland in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” (1976) and a distracted young groupie in “Nashville” (1975), a cheerful portrait of celebrity culture, presidential politics and country and gospel music that was hailed as one of the year’s best films.
She won additional acclaim for Altman’s “3 Women” (1977), a dreamy psychological drama — starring Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule — that won her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival. Her character, Millie Lammoreaux, works in a retirement home in the California desert and passes the time by leafing through magazines, collecting recipes and organizing them by cooking time.
“I put so much of myself into Millie, especially the parts I don’t want to see, all the vanities and the mundane things, like Millie’s love of tuna melt sandwiches, and Scrabble, and the color yellow,” Ms. Duvall told The New York Times, estimating that she wrote about half of the character’s lines herself.
The film built to a painful scene in which Millie is forced to deliver a stillborn baby. Ms. Duvall later said that her eerie, disturbing performance inspired director Stanley Kubrick to cast her as Wendy Torrance, the terrorized wife and mother in “The Shining” (1980). “I love the way you cry,” he told her in a telephone conversation.
Based on a best-selling novel by Stephen King, “The Shining” opened to mixed reviews, with some critics dismissing Ms. Duvall’s performance as awkward, even cartoonish. But the film has since been hailed as a horror classic, with admirers championing her portrayal of an abused, traumatized spouse trying to survive as her husband (played by Nicholson) loses his mind while working as a Colorado hotel concierge.
By many accounts, the film’s production was as much of a nightmare as its story. According to the Hollywood Reporter , the film took 56 weeks to shoot, an unusually long time due in part to a fire that forced the Overlook Hotel set to be rebuilt, and in part to the director’s exacting approach. Kubrick had his actors do dozens of takes, including shots of Mrs. Duvall running through the hotel, waving a baseball bat at her demonic husband, and carrying her young son (Danny Lloyd) in her arms.
“That was a life experience like the Vietnam War probably was for veterans,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, looking back on the production. “It was grueling — six days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day, with a half hour off for lunch, for a year and a month. The role required me to cry for at least nine of those months. Jack had to be angry all the time, and I had to be hysterical all the time.”
Later in life, Ms. Duvall was quick to note that she had fond memories of the set, where she and Kubrick played chess between scenes. But she also noted that the experience took its toll.
“After a while, your body rebels,” she told The Reporter in 2021. “It’s like, ‘Don’t do this anymore. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought would make me cry. I would wake up on a Monday morning, like, early, and realize I was going to cry all day because it was planned, and I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t do that, I can’t do that.’ And I would do it anyway.”
The eldest of four children, Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth on July 7, 1949, and grew up in Houston. Her father was a cattle auctioneer turned lawyer, and her mother worked in real estate.
Early on, there were few signs that Ms. Duvall would pursue acting. When she sang Joyce Kilmer’s short poem “Trees” at a sixth-grade talent show, she stumbled over the lyrics, left the stage in tears, and declared she would never show her face at school again.
“That night I heard my parents outside my bedroom door,” she told the Los Angeles Times, “saying, ‘Well, I guess she’s just not talented.’ Isn’t that a classic?”
Mrs. Duvall vowed to become a scientist and was an excellent student until her junior year of high school, when she discovered “emotions and boys.” Her grades began to slip and she transferred to a local junior college, where she took classes in nutrition and diet therapy before dropping out and taking a job as a cosmetics salesperson at a Foley’s department store.
Around 1970, she met some of Altman’s crew at a party in Houston for her friend, the artist Bernard Sampson. Dressed in patched jeans and a Mexican blouse, with bells around her waist, she showed Sampson’s paintings, trying to interest the attendees in making a sale. They arranged a meeting with other Altman employees, she told Interview magazine, where they turned down the art but asked her if she wanted to be in a movie.
“I thought, ‘Oh no, a porn movie,’ because that’s what I was approached for in a drugstore when I was 17.”
The film was “Brewster McCloud,” in which she played an Astrodome tour guide who becomes involved with a reclusive, flight-obsessed young man (Bud Cort) who is trying to build a pair of wings. It was the beginning of a happy and fruitful collaboration with Altman, whom she nicknamed “Pirate” for his tough exterior. “His first and only real advice was never to take myself seriously,” she said.
Around the same time, Ms. Duvall married Sampson. They moved to Los Angeles and divorced after four years. She later lived in New York with singer-songwriter Paul Simon; according to People magazine, they met while working on Woody Allen’s 1977 film “Annie Hall,” in which Ms. Duvall had a small role as a Rolling Stone writer. (“Sex with you is a truly Kafkaesque experience,” she tells Allen’s neurotic protagonist.)
Ms. Duvall later had supporting roles in Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” (1981), Steven Soderbergh’s “The Underneath” (1995), Jane Campion’s “The Portrait of a Lady” (1996), and “Roxanne” (1987), a “Cyrano de Bergerac” retelling starring Steve Martin.
She increasingly turned to producing rather than acting. She tapped into her love of illustrated children’s books (she owned about 3,000, according to a Washington Post report) and launched children’s anthology shows, lovingly recreating classic stories in her series “Faerie Tale Theatre,” which premiered on Showtime in 1982. The show’s episodes were directed by filmmakers including Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton; Williams, her “Popeye” co-star, played the Frog Prince in the pilot.
Ms. Duvall received two Emmy nominations as a producer of two sequels, “Tall Tales & Legends” and “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.” While playing Little Bo Peep in another children’s project, the Disney Channel movie “Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme,” she met and fell in love with actor and musician Dan Gilroy, who became her partner of 35 years.
Besides Gilroy, there are three other brothers who survive the disaster.
In the early 2000s, Ms. Duvall stepped back from acting and withdrew from public life, leading to rumors and speculation about what had happened to her. She made a rare appearance in 2016, when she was interviewed on the talk show “Dr. Phil,” in which she spoke about her struggles with mental health. “I’m very sick. I need help,” she said, before making bizarre statements about evil forces and messages from beyond the grave.
The talk show episode was widely criticized as exploitative. In its aftermath, Ms. Duvall once again disappeared from the spotlight, returning to her home in the Texas Hill Country. She last appeared on screen in “The Forest Hills,” a 2023 indie horror film starring Edward Furlong.
The New York Times reported in an April profile of Ms. Duvall that her extended hiatus from acting appeared to have been caused by “the emotional impact of two events: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged her Los Angeles home, and the stressful toll of one of her brothers falling ill, prompting her to return to her native Texas three decades ago.”
Ms. Duvall also seemed wounded by the course of her career. “I was a star; I had leading roles,” she told the newspaper, shaking her head. “People think it’s just getting older, but it’s not. It’s violence.”
“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they turned on you?” she continued. “You would never believe it unless it happened to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”