Shelley Duvall Stood Out
No one looked like her. No one sounded like her. No one thought like her. And everyone in Hollywood knew it.
If Shelley Duvall appeared in a crowd, your eye would instantly find her: a slender woman with sharp-angled arms and hips, saucer eyes, a swan’s neck, a tulip-bud mouth, a gap between her front teeth, and legs so long that she seemed much taller than her five-foot-eight height. (At her Fort Worth, Texas, high school, her nickname was Sparrowlegs.) If you heard Duvall’s voice issuing from a tiny TV at low volume on the other side of an apartment, you’d know it was her, with that fluttery clarinet tone and those North Texas–accented words butting up against one another. Nobody looked like her, sounded like her, or acted like her. She was an aspirational figure for any woman with dreams and skills who was told she wasn’t the right type to make it in show business. She was an oddball fairy-tale princess. And in the 1980s, she built a kingdom, moving behind the camera to create three fantasy series, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater, Tall Tales and Legends, and Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories.
Duvall died today at 75 of complications from diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas, according to a statement by her partner of 40 years, musician Dan Gilroy. She appeared in some of the greatest works of the most seismically inventive era of American movies. Many were directed by her mentor Robert Altman, including Brewster McCloud (her screen debut), McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Popeye. The last saw Duvall singing and dancing and flirting as Popeye the Sailor’s gangly sweetheart, Olive Oyl; a critical disappointment on first release, it eventually became Altman’s most financially successful movie (thanks to home video and TV showings). Duvall’s incarnation of Olive Oyl belongs in the Perfect Comics Casting pantheon, alongside performers like Christopher Reeve as Superman and Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, who put such a distinctive mark on a character that it became hard to imagine anyone else playing them. (Duvall’s performance got a surprise second life in 2002, when Paul Thomas Anderson used Duvall’s rendition of Olive’s anthem “He Needs Me” as underscoring in a key sequence of Punch-Drunk Love.)
Duvall was also the co-star of one of the most obsessively analyzed horror films ever made, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, in which recovering alcoholic writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) gets a job as a caretaker at the Overlook, a haunted Colorado hotel that’s closed all winter, then cracks in isolation and tries to kill his wife, Wendy (Duvall), and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Decades after its release in 1980, The Shining became the focus of an online civil war between movie buffs over whether Kubrick’s relentless, repetitive production methods and attempts to keep Duvall psychologically unbalanced throughout the 500-day shoot constituted sexism and workplace abuse. King loathed the film’s portrayal of Wendy, calling it “one of the most misogynistic portrayals ever put on film … she’s basically there to scream and be stupid.”
In interviews at the time of production as well as decades later, Duvall described drastically mixed feelings about the experience. (Paul Simon, her then-boyfriend of three years, broke up with Duvall at an airport shortly before the start of production. She met Simon when they were both acting in Annie Hall, and he dumped her for Carrie Fisher — after Duvall introduced them. Her agony over their split made an already hellish shoot even worse.) In a 1980 making-of film by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, Duvall said, “We had the same end in mind, it was just that sometimes we differed in our means, and by the end, the means met.” But in a 2021 Hollywood Reporter profile, she cried while rewatching the scene where Wendy locks herself in a bathroom to escape Jack’s rampage and he destroys the door with an ax. “We filmed that for about three weeks,” Duvall said. “Every day. It was very hard. Jack was so good — so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing.”
After the one-two punch of Popeye and The Shining (both 1980), Duvall pulled back from acting, though she continued to take small roles here and there, working steadily through the end of the millennium, functionally retiring 24 years ago. (Her notable later work includes Time Bandits, Roxanne, The Portrait of a Lady, Guy Maddin’s whirligig fantasy Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, and Steven Soderbergh’s film noir remake The Underneath.) She already had another life going by then. According to an early-’90s Los Angeles Times profile, the seed was planted during a 1976 audition for Woody Allen’s comedy Annie Hall, in which she would end up playing one of the main character’s former girlfriends, a Rolling Stone writer who tells Allen’s character, “Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience.” Allen would only let Duvall read pages of the script that her character appeared in. She came away from the meeting wondering what it would be like to have a “producer’s control” over a screenplay.
A compulsive reader, she began thinking about beloved books she could adapt for film and TV. She bought the film rights to Tom Robbins’s novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, hoping to produce and play the lead, and wrote the screenplay adaptation, but she couldn’t get funding (“One studio told me, ‘Too quirky even for us,’ and I had toned it down quite a lot!”) and gave back the film rights after four years of struggle. (Cowgirls was ultimately made by Gus Van Sant, starring Uma Thurman.) Three years later, while shooting Popeye in Malta, Duvall killed time between scenes by reading an illustrated edition of The Frog Prince and found herself fantasy-casting her co-star Robin Williams in the title role.
This led Duvall to conceive of a theatrically styled anthology series called Faerie Tale Theater, which she would executive produce, host, sometimes direct or write or narrate, and always control. Showcasing subversive or ironic versions of classic fairy tales, the series would be innocent yet knowing. Duvall conceived it in the vein of entertainments like Looney Tunes or the “Fractured Fairy Tales” segments of The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which melded broad, safe slapstick and wordplay aimed at young children with obscure, surreal, even risqué material that would amuse adults but was coded to be indecipherable to all but the most precocious offspring. Faerie Tale Theater was so eccentric and unclassifiable that no broadcast network would take it.
Undaunted, Duvall ventured into the strange newish no-rules world of cable, which was then considered so disreputable by broadcasters that it wasn’t even allowed to submit its programs for Emmy consideration (until 1997, cable had its own awards, CableACE). Showtime gave Duvall a modest budget cap for each episode and told her that if she didn’t exceed it, she could have creative control. Faerie Tale Theater’s inaugural season was a two-episode test run. It debuted September 11, 1982. It was written, directed, and narrated by Monty Python’s Eric Idle, and it did indeed star Robin Williams as the Frog Prince. The rest of the cast was top-of-the-line as well: Teri Garr as the Princess, René Auberjonois as King Ulrich, Candy Clark as Queen Gwynneth, Roberta Maxwell as Queen Beatrice and Griselda, and Michael Richards as King Geoffrey.
Though shot on video on small soundstages, the episodes had a big feeling because of the star-packed ensembles and the wit and verve of the production itself. The second episode, “Rumplestilskin,” starred Fantasy Island’s Hervé Villechaize as the title character, Ned Beatty as the King, Duvall as the Miller’s Daughter, Paul Dooley as the Miller, and Bud Cort as the Page. The premiere of season two (six episodes) starred Duvall as both Rapunzel and her mother, Jeff Bridges as the Prince, and Gena Rowlands as the Witch, while Roddy McDowall narrated. “The Three Little Pigs” cast Jeff Goldblum as a peevish, neurotic, anxiously monologuing Big Bad Wolf; Billy Crystal, Stephen Furst, and Fred Willard as the pigs; and Doris Roberts as their widowed mama, who lovingly serves her boys a trough of slop and reminiscences, “Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home.”
Faerie Tale Theater ran through 1987, and its episode guide is a staggeringly thorough list of notable performers and storytellers. Directors included Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Burton, Roger Vadim, James Frawley (The Muppet Movie), Emile Ardolino (Dirty Dancing), Ivan Passer (Born to Win), Michael Lindsay-Hogg (Let It Be), and Nicholas Meyer (Star Treks II & VI).
Mick Jagger gave his first dramatic performance in ten years in season two’s “The Nightingale,” as the Emperor, with Bud Cort, Barbara Hershey, Mako, Key Luke, Edward James Olmos, Anjelica Huston, and Jagger’s then-partner Jerry Hall; the script was by Joan Micklin Silver, who directed such classics as Hester Street and Crossing Delancey. Cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer wrote an all-Black cast version of “Puss in Boots” starring Ben Vereen as Puss, Gregory Hines as Edgar, Alfre Woodard as Princess Lovinia, George Kirby as King Fortuitous, and Brock Peters as the Ogre. Idle returned to narrate “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and play the piper. Vincent Price narrated an episode adapted from the Brothers Grimm’s “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” with a cast that included Christopher Lee, David Warner, Peter MacNicol, and Frank Zappa.
The list goes on. Susan Sarandon as Beauty and Klaus Kinski as the Beast. Elliott Gould as the Giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Tatum O’Neal as Goldilocks. Harry Dean Stanton as Rip Van Winkle. Pam Dawber and Treat Williams, actors so wholesomely cute that they might’ve been drawn by the illustrator of a 19th-century fairy-tale collection, played the Little Mermaid and her beau Prince Andrew. Altman regular Karen Black, whose work in Trilogy of Terror was pure nightmare fuel, played the Sea Witch. Only NBC’s Miami Vice gave Faerie Tale Theatre serious competition as the hippest show on TV to act in — and it had probably one hundredth of the budget. Stars who were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for an episode of television or millions for a movie gladly did her show for union scale. They gathered mostly for Duvall, who was as respected for her networking skills and nurturing and collaborative approach to filmmaking as for her accomplishments as an actress.
Each performance was as stacked with layers as a geological core sample. Once she moved behind the camera, it became clear that her work in front of it had given viewers only a glimpse of what she could do.
Some of the casting had an extra-dramatic subtext, too. For instance, in the show’s rendition of “Pinocchio,” Paul Reubens, one of the great stars of 1980s slapstick comedy, played the little wooden boy. The role of Geppetto was played by Carl Reiner, who had come up as performer 30 years earlier on Your Show of Shows and other sketch-focused programs, for which he wrote uncredited and uncompensated material, and slowly became a credited writer and producer on The Dick Van Dyke Show, then a writer and director of theatrical films: i.e., a puppet turned puppeteer. It was the kind of creative decision that did the basic thing it absolutely needed to do while simultaneously satisfying on other levels. That kind of invention had been Duvall’s specialty as an actress. Each performance was as stacked with layers as a geological core sample. Once she moved behind the camera, it became clear that her work in front of it had given viewers only a glimpse of what she could do. Her Showtime series won a Peabody Award and two prime-time Emmys.
In retrospect, it seems incredible that Duvall had never seriously thought about getting into show business until she met Robert Altman. It happened in Houston, Texas, while he was shooting Brewster McCloud, about an oddball young man (Bud Cort) who lives in the Astrodome and is building a pair of wings so he can fly. The party doubled as a showing of paintings by Duvall’s then-fiancé Bernard Sampson (they were married from 1970 to 1974). Three Brewster McCloud crew members who were present were so fascinated by Duvall that they all became convinced that Altman should put her in the film, somewhere, doing something, anything. That’s how arresting she was. They contrived to invite her to meet “art patrons,” but it was really a secret audition for Altman and his producer Lou Adler. Adler later told the Los Angeles Times, “The paintings weren’t great — but her sales pitch was. She had the most amazing amount of energy I’d ever seen in anyone. She looked like a flower; her face was painted with marks around her eyes to accent them. She was overwhelming.”
Altman cast Duvall as Suzanne Davis, Brewster’s “fairy godmother.” (How fitting that her first film role would unwittingly anticipate her work as a producer.) The director later told a biographer that when he saw Duvall present her fiancé’s paintings at the secret audition, “I didn’t believe her. I thought it was an act.” Meaning a performance, because he could not process what he was seeing. Who looked like that? Who behaved that way? Who would wear such gigantic false eyelashes? Later, he gave Duvall a screen test where he asked her questions, some of them probing or mean, because he’d just assumed she was a professional actress. She answered them all in her trademark Texas-kooky deadpan, and Altman realized “she wasn’t kidding. That was really her. She was an untrained, truthful person.”
When she rose to fame in the 1970s, during a brief window in American popular culture when sui generis–looking performers like Gene Hackman, Sissy Spacek, Elliott Gould, and Karen Black could land lead roles, Duvall was still something else. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael called her “the female Buster Keaton” and wrote of her performance as Olive Oyl, “There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall’s acting; she doesn’t seem to owe anything to anyone. She’s an original who has her own limpid way of doing things — a simplicity that isn’t marred by conventional acting technique.”
Look at her performance in Altman’s psychological drama 3 Women, which was inspired by a dream and feels like one (and also like an uncredited precursor to Single White Female). Duvall plays Millie Lammoreaux, a spacey, self-obsessed worker at a health spa that’s frequented mainly by senior citizens. Millie builds a friendship with a new employee, Pinky Rose (Spacek), and ends up letting her move in and become her roommate, setting a strange and blatantly symbiotic relationship into motion. (Millie’s affectionate but clueless diary entries about Pinky are read for the audience in voice-over as Altman cross-cuts to Pinky copying Millie’s personal information into a notebook.) Millie and Pinky’s lives intertwine with a couple of married bar owners, Edgar and his pregnant wife, Willie Hart (Robert Fortier and Janice Rule), in increasingly unsettling ways, and the film becomes darker, creepier, and more overtly metaphorical as it heads toward a classic ’70s head-scratcher finale.
As Millie, Duvall channels the Fort Worth–by–way–of–Alpha Centauri energy that made Altman adore her. When Millie trains Pinky and gives her part of the spa’s script for new customers, she begins with, “What’s wrong with you?” Duvall emphasizes the word wrong rather than you, and it feels just right, because that’s what a ’70s health spa would focus on: the condition, not the individual who has it. At Millie’s kitchen table later in the movie, she says to Pinky, “You don’t like tomatoes? Me either. They used to call ’em love apples, but I don’t love ’em.” Millie says “tomatoes” as “tuhMAYtuhs” and runs the last five words of the last sentence together: “ButidunnLUVum.” And she smiles the whole time, barely moving her body. Her burning cigarette hangs rigidly in space next to her head. She’s not just giving Pinky her full attention; she somehow seems to be trying to burrow into her mind. She’s amping up that stoner singsong quality that always made her distinctive but making it sound more anchored in the real and sadder.
3 Women won Duvall awards for Best Actress from the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, the New York Film Critics Circle (though not the Oscar, which went to Diane Keaton for Annie Hall). It’s a dark-horse candidate for her finest work. The performance projects an eerie, anguished quality that’s impossible to capture in words because the instant you get your mind around it, it evolves into something slightly different from what you thought you’d identified. Without striving to be such a thing, 3 Women is a generational lament, one of the richest of the ’70s dramas, and one of the best portraits of depressive self-destruction since Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (the role that made Nicholson a superstar). She captures a particular kind of girl-woman in Altman’s movie as surely as Nicholson’s Bobby captured a certain kind of man-child.
In a way, everything that Duvall did was rooted in her ability to be a grown-up while at the same time not merely remembering but feeling what it was like to be a kid. She told the Los Angeles Times, “When I turned 18, I felt I was grown up. Then when I was 21, I reflected, ‘Boy, I was just a kid then; now I’m grown up.’ The same thing happened when I was 27. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I realized it was a futile goal to have. You’re never grown up. We’re all still dealing with the same hopes, same fears, same dreams that we had as children.”
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