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Her wide-eyed terror in The Shining (1980)—Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece in which she played Jack Nicholson’s wife—is the first image that comes to mind when we think of Shelley Duvall. However, the late Texan actress, who passed away in her sleep on July 11 at the age of 75 due to severe diabetes, had a much broader film career.
For one thing, there was her special collaboration with another master of cinema, Robert Altman. Altman, who essentially discovered her, cast Duvall as Millie in the acclaimed drama Three Women (1977). This tragicomic and semi-improvised role—which saw her play an employee at a seniors’ spa in the California desert, inviting a colleague, played by Sissy Spacek, to share her apartment—cemented her status as an actress to watch, won her the best-actress award at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival.
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Duvall’s first encounter with Robert Altman took place at a party organized for her then-boyfriend, artist Bernard Sampson, in 1969, when she was 20. The director went on to cast her in Brewster McCloud, her first movie, where she showed a natural talent (despite some youthful awkwardness). In the following years, she would take parts in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), all also under Altman’s direction. “He offers me damn good roles,” she said of the director 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. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”