‘The Shining’ Star Shelley Duvall Dies at 75

Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who costarred in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, has died. She was 75.​​

Duvall died Thursday in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications of diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.​​

“My dear, sweet, wonderful life, partner, and friend left us last night,” Gilroy said in a statement. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away beautiful Shelley.”

​​Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film Brewster McCloud, encountered her at a party she threw in Houston in 1970 to promote the career of her then husband, artist Bernard Sampson. They introduced her to the director, who cast her in Brewster McCloud and made her his protege.​​

Duvall would go on to appear in Altman films including Thieves Like Us, Nashville, Popeye, 3 Women and McCabe & Ms. Miller.

“There is an openness about her,” critic Roger Ebert wrote of her 3 Women performance, “as if somehow nothing has come between her open face and our eyes — no camera, dialogue, makeup, method of acting — and she is spontaneously being the character.”​​

“[Altman] offers me ... good roles,” Duvall 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. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’

”​​Duvall, gaunt and gawky, was no conventional Hollywood starlet. But she had a beguiling frank manner and exuded a singular naturalism. The film critic Pauline Kael called her the “female Buster Keaton.”​​

Shelley Duvall in "The Shining."

Courtesy Everett Collection

At her peak, Duvall was a regular star in some of the defining movies of the 1970s and 1980s. In The Shining, she played Wendy Torrance, who watches in horror as her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), goes crazy while their family is isolated in the Overlook Hotel. It was Duvall’s screaming face that made up half of the film’s most iconic image, along with Jack’s axe coming through the door. She earned a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award Best Actress nomination for 3 Women and 17 honors for producing children's TV shows starring A-list actors like her Popeye costar Robin Williams, including two Emmy nominations.​​

But Duvall disappeared from movies almost as quickly as she arrived in them. By the 1990s, she began retiring from acting. Her last film role was in 2002’s Manna From Heaven. Duvall retreated from public life. Earlier this year, she gave her first interview in years.​​

“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime” — she snapped her fingers — “they turn on you?” Duvall told the Times. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”​