Duvall won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her role in “3 Women.”
Shelley Duvall, the actress best known for her roles in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and “3 Women,” and in Stanley Kubrick’s horror opus “The Shining,” has died, her partner Dan Gilroy told ABC News. She was 75.
“Shelley loved animals, especially birds, now she is free to fly,” Gilroy said. “She suffered for months, as much as I miss her, my life partner of 34 years, I am glad she is no longer suffering.”
A cause of death was not immediately released.
Duvall won a Best Actress award at Cannes for her role in “3 Women” and later won a Peabody Award for producing and hosting the children’s anthology series “Faerie Tale Theatre.”
Born in Texas in 1949, Duvall was a regular in Robert Altman’s films. She appeared in seven of Altman’s films, beginning with 1970’s “Brewster McCloud” (her first film role) and her best-known roles in 1975’s “Nashville” and 1977’s “3 Women.”
Duvall’s last film with Altman was 1980’s “Popeye,” in which she played Olive Oyl, the girlfriend of Robin Williams’ title character.
In 1977, she also co-starred with Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”.
Duvall was probably best known to audiences for her role in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” In the 1980 Stephen King adaptation, Duvall played Wendy Torrance, a housewife who fends off her unstable husband — played by Jack Nicholson — in a haunted hotel in the Rocky Mountains. The film endeared Duvall to horror fans, though she later expressed mixed feelings about the difficulties of filming the movie under Kubrick’s famously iron-fisted direction.
Some of Duvall’s other film roles included Tim Burton’s 1984 short film “Frankenweenie,” Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah’s 1987 romantic comedy “Roxanne,” Jane Campion’s 1996 film “The Portrait of a Lady,” and as Hilary Duff’s witch aunt in 1998’s “Casper Meets Wendy.”
Duvall hosted several television anthology series, including “Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre” in the 1980s and “Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories” in the 1990s, the latter of which earned her an Emmy nomination.
Since the early 2000s, Duvall has largely stayed out of the public eye while living in her home state of Texas. The actress has been open about her struggles with mental illness in recent years.