This body of work paints a picture of an artist paving her own zigzagging path across showbusiness.
Hollywood never quite knew what to do with Shelley Duvall. The Texas-born actress, who died last week at the age of 75, didn’t look like movie stars of her generation or any other. She had exaggerated features (big doe eyes, a bright and toothy smile) that gave her a stylized quality, like a boardwalk caricature come to life. And as a performer, she exuded an upbeat eccentricity — an oddball spirit — well suited to the shaggy American cinema of the 1970s, but less obviously to the slicker entertainments that followed. She didn’t fit easily into any mainstream paradigm of movie stardom, which partially explains the infrequency of her roles over the half-century that followed her screen debut in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud.
That movie is one of four from the director that appears on the list of notable performances below. Honestly, the whole list could be films she made with Altman, who discovered her in Houston and cast her in roles big and small for a full decade. For all of the 1970s, she punched up the margins of his bustling ensembles and took center stage in one of his best, weirdest movies, delivering a layered, improvisational, Cannes-winning turn. No overview of her career is complete without multiple examples of this creative partnership.
After the Altman years and a starring role in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining that exposed her to a larger audience, Duvall floated in and out of the movie business, popping up almost exclusively in supporting roles and sometimes appearing in movies (like the Hulk Hogan vehicle Suburban Commando) unworthy of her talents. For an actor of such vibrant singularity, she was certainly underutilized; though her most prolific decade as an actress was the 1990s, few films she made during that time exhibit the idiosyncratic grace of her best work. Much of what was written and said about Duvall in the later years of her career emphasized the ways she was exploited or mistreated — by Kubrick during the making of The Shining, by Dr. Phil during a 2016 interview that put her struggles with mental illness in the spotlight.
But Duvall’s actual body of work paints a picture of an artist paving her own zigzagging path across show business, albeit with some bumps and detours along the way. Until her retirement in the early 2000s, she was rarely creatively unoccupied, even when she was absent from movie screens. Her small-screen credits — particularly as a host and producer of children’s programming like Faerie Tale Theatre — kept her busy through the ’80s and ’90s, opening her up to a whole different demographic and putting her friendly disposition to a family-friendly use. Consider that popular TV tenure the phantom honorable mention of this overview, a list of highlights plucked from a lopsided but sometimes exhilarating oeuvre.
Brewster McCloud (1970)
Plucked from obscurity after meeting Robert Altman at a party, a 21-year-old Shelley Duvall made her screen debut in the director’s daft black comedy about a bespectacled loner (Bud Cort, doing a kind of dry run to Harold Chasen) who lives in a fallout shelter and tinkers away at a homemade flying machine. Duvall is the chipper Astrodome tour guide who takes his virginity and zips him around in a stolen Plymouth Road Runner. With her big, expressive eyes framed by painted lashes, her dialogue delivered in a drawling singsong, the then-unknown actress offers what you could call a proto manic pixie dream girl; her loopy free-spiritedness gives Brewster McCloud — the character and the movie — a shot of life, at least until the betrayal and dark fatalism of the ending. Whenever Duvall’s Suzanne takes the wheel, this absurdist fairy tale really hits its whimsical mark. The film didn’t make a huge splash (it was overshadowed by Altman’s other comedy that year, M*A*S*H), but it did mark the beginning of a beautiful creative relationship.
Thieves Like Us (1974)
After her effervescent entrance in Brewster McCloud and a nearly wordless appearance in the following year’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Altman lined up something close to a leading role for Duvall, casting her as the teenage sweetheart of on-the-lam bank robber Bowie (Keith Carradine) in his ambling outlaw drama Thieves Like Us. Duvall sometimes projected an almost childlike joy — it’s one reason she transitioned so easily into kiddie storytelling later in life — and Altman nurses that guileless quality in the film’s lovely, baggy scenes of courtship as the young lovers smoke, kiss, and listen to the radio in bed together. The cruel logic of the movie is that their romance is inherently on borrowed time, doomed to be destroyed by Bowie’s unsavory associations and life of crime. In that respect, the whole arc of Thieves Like Us is written across Duvall’s changing expressions: She’s the picture of sweet innocence, and then — in the shattering climax of the film, built on her devastating screams of despair — of innocence lost.
3 Women (1977)
Possibly the pinnacle of Duvall’s acting, and certainly the most bewitching of her collaborations with Altman. In the endlessly mysterious 3 Women, she plays Mildred “Millie” Lammoreaux, a self-absorbed, loquacious, guy-crazy extrovert who works at an elder-care facility in the California desert. Duvall, who won the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival, improvised much of her gossipy dialogue. She’s wonderfully entertaining … and then comes the major schism of the film’s dreamlike second half, when Millie seems to trade personalities with her roommate, a quiet, strange teenager played by Sissy Spacek. Nearly 50 years later, 3 Women still beckons adventurous interpreters, like the missing link between Bergman’s Persona and Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Duvall is a big reason why: All the film’s insights into the slipperiness of identity are there in her casually virtuosic, veritable dual performance, in which a funny flibbertigibbet loses hold of herself as the world around seems to splinter into something frighteningly new.
Annie Hall (1977)
1977 was a big year for Duvall. Within weeks of the premiere of her award-winning work in 3 Women, she also made a brief but memorable appearance in the future Best Picture winner. Pam, her character in Annie Hall, is a Rolling Stone writer whom Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer dates during one of the off periods of his on-off relationship with Annie. Duvall only has a couple scenes in the movie, and she’s mostly a foil — a New Age flake whose enthusiasm serves as setup for witheringly sarcastic Woodman quips. Yet Duvall is so naturally charismatic in the bit role, transforming a walking punch line into a person (“With Shelley, it was clear she was giving that character — only words on the page — a real life,” Allen recently said following her death), that she ends up throwing Alvy’s miserable qualities into sharper relief. You want better for her than this judgmental snob! The performance proved, in miniature, that Duvall’s magic could thrive beyond Altman’s guidance. She was, to quote Pam, transplendent.
The Shining (1980)
Duvall’s most famous performance remains drenched in controversy thicker than the blood spilling from the Overlook’s elevators, though perspectives on the matter have shifted some over the years. While many have characterized Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of the actress on the set of his towering Stephen King adaptation as abusive, Duvall frequently framed it as merely contentious — a clash of artists with different ideas of who poor, terrorized Wendy Torrance was supposed to be. Either way, history has vindicated Duvall’s perfectly petrified performance, tarred with a “Worst Actress” nomination by the lazy hacks behind the Razzies. So much of the pounding terror of The Shining rises from her reactions: It’s not Jack Nicholson bellowing “Here’s Johnny!” through an axed door but Duvall’s shrieking response that really puts the horror into this timeless horror movie.
Popeye (1980)
The Duvall and Altman show came to a brilliantly weird ending with a big, bizarre, all-ages musical. Released just a few months after The Shining, this big-screen vehicle for everyone’s favorite sailor man was equally misunderstood — a costly flop that likely damaged the careers of both its director and his lead actress. But Popeye is a visionary delight, indebted equally to its kid-courting source material and to the ramshackle picaresques the pair made before it. And perhaps even more so than Robin Williams, who moved from television to movies with the title role, Duvall is perfectly cast as a live-action cartoon: In both her striking, animated features and the gentle, lilting innocence of her screen presence, she is Olive Oyl. The actress also gets to sing a couple of pop songwriter Harry Nilsson’s endearing tunes — including the lovely “He Needs Me,” later repurposed and immortalized for a new generation by Paul Thomas Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love.
Time Bandits (1981)
After the 1970s and her run of films with Altman, Duvall only sporadically graced movie screens, often in supporting roles. But she could do a lot with a little. She’s pricelessly goofy in her handful of scenes in Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam’s beloved cult sci-fi comedy. Paired with Michael Palin, she plays a mysteriously immortal (or maybe reincarnated?) maiden whose attempts to share a flowery romantic moment with her suitor keep getting interrupted when the film’s title characters — a band of amoral, time-traveling thieves — drop out of thin air and on top of them. It’s a running gag that spans thousands of years (we first see the lovebirds in the Middle Ages, then aboard the Titanic), and Duvall gets right into the Pythonesque spirit of the material with her campy swooning and exaggerated, puckered anticipation of a kiss. While many of her early, iconic films capitalized on the actor’s flower-child naturalism, Time Bandits showcased a talent for broad, theatrical comedy, too. More directors should have found a use for it.
Frankenweenie (1984)
Another minor role elevated with major charm. Just as Altman once took a chance on her, Duvall lent her chops to a short film by a scrappy aspiring director: a young Tim Burton, whose half-hour Universal Monsters spoof got him fired from Disney while anticipating the feature-length Hollywood fantasies he’d make thereafter. Though Burton’s black-and-white imagery goes a long way to selling the James Whale homage of Frankenweenie, Duvall’s performance as young Victor’s mother sends a volt of human warmth through the material, lending the genre throwback a real heartbeat. Walking a tricky tonal tightrope, she at once blends into the film’s stylized American yesterday and comes across as an actual person without quotation marks. For Duvall fans, the weirdest thing about this weird children’s film was probably seeing L.A. Joan herself grown into a smiling suburban homemaker.
Roxanne (1987)
The supportive friend in a romantic comedy is much too stock of a role for a performer as delightfully off-kilter as Duvall. But Roxanne is a very good romantic comedy — a sweet, clever riff on Cyrano de Bergerac that puts a giant prosthetic nose on Steve Martin’s face. And Duvall brings a typically genuine amiability to the part of Dixie, godsister of Martin’s Charlie and the movie’s voice of levelheaded reason, who gently plays matchmaker for the film’s lovelorn hero and the brainy, eponymous object of his affection (Daryl Hannah). Dixie’s plea that Charlie simply tell Roxanne how he feels ends up landing like true romantic wisdom, sage advice that cuts through all the screwball complications and proxy seductions of the timeless Edmond Rostand plot. As usual, Duvall is totally in sync with the vibes of the film — in this case, a gentle wittiness and down-to-earth sincerity. You can wish Roxanne gave her more scenes, and more to do in them, while still appreciating the pleasures of her emotionally open turn.
The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
The last notable performance of Duvall’s career before she essentially retired from acting was in this Jane Campion costume drama. She plays Countess Gemini, an aristocrat whose kookiness supplies the otherwise heavy material, adapted from the Henry James novel of the same name, with some welcome comic relief. It is, once more, a small role (she’s not even glimpsed in the film’s original trailer), but also a scene-stealing one, and Duvall gets one crucial, tender moment, dropping a bombshell truth on Nicole Kidman’s heartlessly manipulated heroine. The performance remains a reminder of how easily the actress slipped into any era; while she did her greatest work as thoroughly modern Millie, she was at home in frills and lace, too.
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