Shelly Duvall, Star of ‘The Shining’ and ‘Nashville,’ Dies at 75

Shelly Duvall, who starred as Jack Nicholson’s tormented wife in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has died. She was 75.

The star’s death was announced on Thursday morning by her long-time partner Dan Gilroy.

“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” Gilroy wrote, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Duvall has suffered from a series of health issues for more than a decade, including diabetes and mental health problems. She even appeared on the Dr Phil show and spoke openly about her mental health challenges.

Born on July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth, Texas, Duvall met famed film director Robert Altman at a party while he was shooting Brewster McCloud in 1970. Altman was immediately taken by her and asked her to come to Hollywood. Altman later cast her in McCabe & Mrs. Miller in 1971 and in Thieves Like Us in 1974. She was next in Altman’s Nashville in 1975, and she never looked back.

Duvall once sang Altman’s praise, telling The New York Times in 1977 that, “He offers me damn good roles. 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.”

The Texas native won the best actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for portraying Millie in Altman’s 1977 film, 3 Women.

Terrified Shelley Duvall in lobby card for the film ‘The Shining’, 1980. (Warner Brothers/Getty Images)

Despite going from an unknown with no acting pretentious or experience, Duvall went on to appear in a long list of movies and by 1980 she came to the attention of master director Stanley Kubrick who cast her as the terrified wife in his adaptation of writer Stephen King’s The Shining.

Duvall has said that her experience on The Shining was “unbearable” and that she felt that Kubrick antagonized her repeatedly. His style of perfectionism was also taxing. For instance, she filmed the baseball bat scene 127 times before the director was satisfied with a take. She added that Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end.”

She also said that she was required to cry so much in the film that she eventually had trouble summoning the ability to turn it on when Kubrick wanted it.

“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,” she said in a 2021 interview. “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.'”

After The Shining Duvall gave memorable performances in Popeye (1980), Time Bandits (1981), Rocket Man (1997) and many more. However, by 2000 she had semi retired and appeared in only four productions afterward. Her last performance was as “Mama” in the horror film The Forest Hills starring Edward Furlong and Dee Wallace.

She also appeared in a number of TV series including Cannon, Love American Style, Baretta, Saturday Night Live, The Twilight Zone, Fraiser, and Faerie Tale Theater.

Duvall was married to Bernard Sampson from 1970 to 1974, and after their divorce, she never married again. She was, though, a partner with singer Paul Simon from 1976 to 1978, she lived with actor Stan Wilson, and spent three decades with musician Dan Gilroy from 1989 to her death.

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