SHELLEY DUVALL WAS SO MUCH MORE THAN A VICTIM

Duvall didn’t regret making “The Shining,” and her career extended far beyond it.

There’s a persistent narrative that filming The Shining shattered Shelley Duvall’s psyche and prompted her to walk away from Hollywood altogether.

It isn’t true.

As we reflect on the incomparable actress’ legacy in the wake of her death at age 75 on Thursday, it’s vital that we don’t reduce her life to that of some passive victim whose supposed weakness and lack of resilience caused her to unravel at the hand of an exacting filmmaker. Framing Duvall’s work in such a way does her a great disservice, stripping her of agency, strength, and creative talent in our collective mind’s eye.

That’s not to say that The Shining was necessarily a breezy shoot, or that Duvall had the time of her life while making Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic — by many accounts, the actress certainly had her share of struggles during the film’s lengthy production. But those struggles are not the result of some maniacal abuse from behind the camera, and they are not the reason Duvall left filmmaking in the rearview.

Before the shoot

Kubrick cast Duvall as Wendy Torrance, the wife of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, off the strength of her performance in Robert Altman’s 1977 dreamlike horror-drama 3 Women. At that point, she’d appeared in six of Altman’s projects: Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson, as well as 3 Women. She’d only played one part outside of her Altman collaborations: a supporting role in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, also from 1977, which ultimately won the Oscar for Best Picture.

Each of those films beautifully displayed Duvall’s staggeringly singular screen presence, whether her role was large or small. With no formal training, Duvall immediately showed her innate powers as an actress: her uniquely sing-songy delivery style, her offbeat sense of humor, her fascinating balance of self-assurance and delicate vulnerability. “He said: ‘I like the way you cry,’” Duvall recalled Kubrick saying of her 3 Women performance in a 2024 interview with The New York Times.

Before embarking on a flight to London — where she would spend the next 56 weeks shooting The Shining — Duvall’s boyfriend of three years, Paul Simon, broke up with her in the airport, per a 2021 interview with THR. Kubrick and his daughter greeted her once she arrived. “We had a nice dinner, and that was it,” Duvall said. “The rest of the time we were at work.”

Filming The Shining

The Times noted that Duvall remembered “fond memories” of shooting The Shining: she played chess with Kubrick between takes, and enjoyed McDonald’s and cigarettes with the cast and crew.

However, Wendy’s panicked, hysterical desperation proved to be a strenuous disposition to maintain on screen, and Kubrick’s excessive amount of takes meant that Duvall needed to remain in an intense mindset for much of the shoot. In many of her reflections on making the film, it seems that some of Duvall’s greatest strengths as a performer — her sensitivity, soulfulness, emotional rawness, and overwhelming physical commitment to her roles — caused her considerable pain as she felt deeply for Wendy Torrance.

“[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,” Duvall told THR. “And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult.”

Duvall also told the outlet that to get in the right emotional state for her character, she would listen to sad music on a Walkman. “Or you just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family or friends,” she said. “But after a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”

The actress admitted that Kubrick did have a “streak” of cruelty within him, though she believed it came about “because people have been that way to him at some time in the past.”

“He was very warm and friendly to me,” Duvall continued. “He spent a lot of time with Jack and me. He just wanted to sit down and talk for hours while the crew waited. And the crew would say, ‘Stanley, we have about 60 people waiting.’ But it was very important work.”

When asked about the iconic staircase sequence toward the end of the film, Duvall said, “It was a difficult scene, but it turned out to be one of the best scenes in the film… I’d like to watch the movie again. I haven’t seen it in a long time.”

After revisiting the scene, Duvall became emotional — but in her explanation, it seemed that her response came from a deep empathy for other victims of abuse, not her own trauma. “We filmed that for about three weeks,” she 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.”

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

No regrets

Duvall reflected on her collaboration with Kubrick in a 2011 interview with ComingSoon. “Stanley really gets a bad reputation sometimes, but he was a perfectionist,” she said. “We had our moments when we laughed and joked around on set, but then there were times that we just exploded at each other! I’m a very stubborn person and don’t like being bossed around and told what to do, Stanley pushed and pushed to get the performance out of me that he wanted.”

“The script wasn’t really specific enough for me to understand what my character was going through mentally, I played it out as a battered but loving housewife who supports her husband through all the s--- in their marriage,” she continued. “Stanley wanted a tough, strong, independent woman, I disagreed with that decision, but the way all my scenes worked out, you see all those emotions in my character. What I thought my character should be and what he thought my character should be rolled into one. It was a hell of a shoot but he got what he wanted out of me!”

Duvall explicitly said that she does not regret making the film. “I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything,” she said in 2001. “Because of Stanley! It was a fascinating learning experience. It was such intense work that I think it makes you smarter — but I wouldn’t want to go through it again.”

The actress also noted that her creative differences with Kubrick helped improve the overall film. “If it hadn’t been for that volley of ideas, and sometimes butting of heads together, it wouldn’t have come out as good as it did,” she said in a 1979 conversation with Kubrick’s assistant Leon Vitali. “And it also helps get the emotion up and the concentration up, because it builds up anger, actually, and you get more out of yourself. And he knew that, and he knew he was getting more out of me by doing that, so it was sort of like a game.”

Sarah Lukowski, a journalist who runs the Shelley Duvall Archive accounts on social media and befriended the actress during the last chapter of her life, said that Duvall still reflected positively on The Shining in her final years.

“Shelley unfortunately has struggles with her mental health, but that has nothing to do with Shining,” Lukowski wrote in a viral thread that sought to debunk rumors of abuse on the film. “In all my very recent conversations with her, she still speaks highly of Shining and how she loved Kubrick. She still holds NO grudges.”

After the Overlook

False narratives suggesting The Shining killed Duvall’s career are particularly puzzling when considering that she continued acting and producing for 20 years after the film’s release. Perhaps her best-known project outside of the Overlook Hotel came the same year as The Shining: the Robin Williams–starring Popeye, which marked her final collaboration with Altman. In her performance as Olive Oyl, Duvall skillfully maneuvers cartoonish physical comedy and lends authentic musicality to the original songs written by Harry Nilsson.

Later, the actress appeared in high-profile projects such as Terry Gilliam’s cult classic comedy Time Bandits, the Steve Martin rom-com Roxanne, the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando, and Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady.

Duvall also created, hosted, and executive produced Faerie Tale Theatre, the anthology children’s program that staged various fairy tales with star-studded casts, running for six seasons on Showtime. Her forays into fairy tale stories and children’s entertainment extended far beyond Fairie Tale Theatre, too, with projects like Tall Tales & Legends, Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme, Shelley Duvall's Bedtime Stories, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

Duvall did step away from the spotlight after 2002’s Manna from Heaven. She’d actually moved from Los Angeles to Texas Hill Country after her home was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake and one of her brothers fell ill.

“It was great, all those years in L.A., really terrific,” Duvall’s longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, told The New York Times. “And when we moved, after the earthquake, it was terrific in Texas. Things went downhill when she started becoming afraid of things, maybe didn’t want to work. It’s really hard to pin it on any one thing.”

Duvall died Thursday following complications from diabetes, and her work and legacy will persist because of the overwhelming artistry vibrantly present in each of her performances. She brought all of her projects a sense of liveliness, warmth, and complexity that few entertainers can muster, and it never felt like she was being anything or anyone but herself. Duvall gave everything she had in every performance, and we are immensely fortunate that she shared the gift of her presence as long as she did.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.

2024-07-12T01:34:08Z dg43tfdfdgfd