It was Shelley Duvall’s destiny to become most widely known for a single film or maybe for a single poster image from it, shockingly and cartoonishly explicit. The image certainly did justice to her intensity and capacity for utterly unselfconscious performance, but said nothing about the subtlety, strength, wit and unfakable superstar quality that otherwise marked her work.
This was her Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 1980, playing the terrified wife of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, marooned together in a haunted offseason hotel. To the right of the poster’s frame, Duvall’s wide-open eyes and mouth – black chasms of fear, an almost supernatural and faintly eroticised image. To the left, the grinningly crazy face of Nicholson as he crashes through the door with an axe, intent on killing her. For many, the image came to epitomise the sexual politics of Hollywood that shaped (but did not destroy) Duvall’s career. For all that he’s sweatily deranged, Nicholson looks relaxed and enjoying himself. Duvall looks genuinely afraid, a testament of course to her talent, but it’s uncomfortable to perceive given what we later found out about the toll that The Shining took on her, endless takes and punishing schedules without a word of emollient praise, having to deal with those alpha males Kubrick and Nicholson.
It was the role that found Duvall on the verge of turning to smaller character roles – and much later Duvall, in her 60s and 70s and in (temporary) retirement, would find herself in a perfect storm of media and industry hypocrisy and incomprehension. She did not match what they expected of older women, women who were no longer stars, women who did not fit the behaviour model: condescension, well-meant dismay, ageism and sexism greeted Duvall’s admittedly vulnerable or idiosyncratic behaviour: she was not a demurely submissive former celebrity, she was not ashamed – as many clearly expected her to be – of the way she was; she didn’t conform to how people thought she should look. She even refused to perform the role of recluse properly: being open, cheerful, and interested in working again.
Her best work was clearly with Robert Altman, the film-maker who discovered her, and found in her those easy, unforced performances and line-readings that lent texture, sexuality and her own kind of innocent mystery to his films. Shelley Duvall was intensely modern, the very face of the New American Cinema, but was also in her slender grace and wide-eyed charm, and her way with a cigarette, a neo-flapper, a kind of 20s or 30s woman reborn long after the second world war – which also made her an excellent casting choice in period movies.
Sissy Spacek, in Altman’s 3 Women from 1977, calls her “the most perfect person I ever met”, and for all that it’s a comic and ironic moment, there is a kind of truth in it. Duvall delivered a kind of perfection in Altman’s still amazing film about the enigmatically complex trio, Duvall, Spacek and Janice Rule, a psychological drama conceived at the opposite end of the universe from Bergman’s Persona, strange and dreamlike, but forthright, robust, open and American. Every microsecond that Shelley Duvall is on screen is drenched with a kind of guileless, distraite sensuality. She was brilliant also as the bank robber’s non-Bonnie girlfriend in Altman’s Thieves Like Us and as the hapless woman forced to work in the brothel in McCabe and Mrs Miller. For Woody Allen, she contributed an imperishable cameo in Annie Hall as the journalist and the film leaves us to wonder how American cinema might have changed if Shelley Duvall had had the title role. Perhaps she was too really individual, or too subversive, to fabricate that kind of kooky performance.
Altman found in Duvall that feel for combining sexiness with comic innocence in her cameo in 1975’s Nashville and in 1970’s Brewster McCloud, yet perhaps it was Altman who did her no favours by casting her as Olive Oyl in Popeye in 1980, the same year as The Shining, again playing a wife to an over-the-top attention-grabbing male lead: that is, Robin Williams as Popeye himself. Terry Gilliam found a witty and intuitive way into Shelley Duvall’s performing persona by casting her as the timeless lover opposite a similarly unlikely swain: Michael Palin, and perhaps there is a genius in making Michael Palin her amour. I’d have liked to see Duvall recur as Palin’s love interest in Tomkinson’s Schooldays. Duvall did first-class work for Guy Maddin, Jane Campion and Fred Schepisi but it was surely Robert Altman for whom she gave her classic performances. In 3 Women her screen presence is sublime.