The Shining actress Shelley Duvall dies, aged 75

11 July 2024, 17:08

Shelley Duvall has died aged 75.

The actress sadly died in her sleep due to complications with diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas.

News of her death was given to The Hollywood Reporter by her life partner Dan Gilroy, who met Duvall in 1989.

"My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley," Gilroy said.

The uniquely gawky and big-eyed actress became an icon of horror cinema after her turn in Stanley Kubrick's lauded psychological horror, The Shining.

Starring alongside Jack Nicholson's axe-wielding antagonist Jack Torrance, the on-screen images of her terrified and locked in the bathroom as he chops the door down became instantly iconic.

Duvall appeared visibly exhausted throughout the film, that's because in reality she was - it's been reported that Kubrick forced her to perform the iconic scene with the baseball bat an exhausting 127 times.

The experience changed Duvall's career entirely, and left a lasting negative impact on her.

In 1981 she told People magazine that Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end."

"I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me."

Before her turn in the iconic 1980 horror, Shelley made a name for herself as director Robert Altman's protege, starring in seven of his films.

"He offers me damn good roles," she told the New York Times in 1977. "None of them have been alike."

"He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him."

She acted in films such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, and 3 Women in 1977 for which she won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Duvall also starred opposite Robin Williams in the 1980 musical adaptation of cartoon comedy Popeye, Woody Allen's celebrated comedy drama Annie Hall in 1977, in former Monty Python man Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits in 1981, next to Steve Martin in 1987's Dixie, and in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady in 1996.

From 1976 to 1978, Shelley Duvall and singer-songwriter Paul Simon were also in a relationship.

He left her for Carrie Fisher, and told her so just as she was boarding the flight to London to work on The Shining. She cried the entire flight.

Sadly, health issues - both physical and mental - plagued Duvall who stepped away from acting for over two decades before returning in 2022 for her final role in The Forest Hills.

In 1980, famed film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Shelley Duvall "looks and sounds like almost nobody else, and has possibly played more really different kinds of characters than almost any other young actress of the 1970s."

"In all of her roles, there is an openness about her, as if somehow nothing has come between her open face and our eyes - no camera, dialogue, makeup, method of acting - and she is just spontaneously being the character."