Shelley Duvall, the actress who personified the quiet desperation of a wife married to her psychopathic husband in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” has passed away at 75.
The New York Post reported on Duvall’s death resulting from a diabetes complication. Dan Gilroy, Duvall’s longtime husband, confirmed she passed away peacefully at her Texas. “My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” Gilroy said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter.
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The Texas native got her big Hollywood break in 1970 when she met director Robert Altman at a party and accepted his offer to star in “Brewster McCloud,” marking her first on-screen role. “I simply got on a plane and did it. I was swept away,” she said in a past interview, the Post reported.
Duvall and Altman went on to work together on a number of projects over the course of her decades in film, including “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” and “3 Women.”
However, the actress’s defining role came in Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror “The Shining,” an adaption of the eponymous novel by Stephen King set in a remote and deserted Colorado hotel. Jack Nicholson, who played her husband, tortured Duvall and their young son as he descended into madness brought on my ghosts at the hotel. In an iconic scene, Duvall cowers in the couple’s hotel bathroom while Nicholson’s character attempts to chop down the locked door with an ax, sticking his head through a hole and yelling the unforgettable phrase, “Here’s Johnny!”
One year after the film’s release, Duvall admitted that the role took an extremely heavy toll on her mental well-being. She was “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end,” the actress told People in a 1981 interview. “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me,” Duvall added.
In 2021, Duvall shared even more insights into the disturbing project and her work with the iconic director.
“[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult.”
She said before filming scenes she would “listen to sad songs. Or you just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends.”
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