11.7.2024
Shelley Duvall passed away shortly after celebrating her 75th birthday. The actress, renowned for her role in The Shining, died on Thursday, July 11, at her home in Blanco, Texas, due to complications from diabetes, as reported by her partner Dan Gilroy to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. “My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” Gilroy told THR, adding, “There has been too much suffering lately, but now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Director Scott Goldberg, who collaborated with Duvall on her final film, 2023’s The Forest Hills, expressed, “Shelley leaves behind an amazing legacy and will be missed by many people, myself included. I am proud of her for overcoming adversity to act again and will always be forever grateful for her friendship and kindness.”
Born on July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth, Texas, Duvall initially considered a career in science before her serendipitous encounter with director Robert Altman’s crew members at a party in Houston in 1970, which led to her first on-screen appearance in Brewster McCloud.
She continued her collaboration with Altman in films such as 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1974’s Thieves Like Us, and 1975’s Nashville. Duvall appeared in over a dozen movies and television shows throughout the ’70s, including a role in 1977’s Annie Hall, before her best-known performance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic The Shining.
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The film, which required a 56-week shoot and held a Guinness World Record for “most retakes for one scene with dialogue,” starred Duvall and Jack Nicholson in an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel.
“[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard,” the actress told The Hollywood Reporter as she recalled her experiences filming The Shining in February 2021. “And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult.”
To get into the right headspace, Duvall said she would “listen to sad songs” before each scene or “just think about something unfortunate in your life or how much you miss your family and friends.”
“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 added. “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 say, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack [Nicholson] said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.'”
The Shining made Duvall a household name. “When somebody recognizes you at a Dairy Queen in Texas, you’re a star,” she told PEOPLE in 1981. Duvall tallied 40 more television and film roles two decades after The Shining’s release. She turned toward producing in the ’80s with children’s anthology series like Tall Tales & Legends and Faerie Tale Theatre, the latter of which she convinced stars like Robin Williams, Teri Garr, Jeff Bridges, Mick Jagger, and Liza Minnelli to appear on, according to the Los Angeles Times. The series won her a Peabody Award in 1984.
“Producing allows you to take control of your life,” Duvall told PEOPLE in 1987. “You don’t have that kind of control in acting. You don’t have to wait for someone to offer you a part. You can get things going by yourself.”
“I like producing better,” she continued. “Acting doesn’t promote sanity. I don’t ever want to lose my joy in life. I guess I’ve got a bit of the Peter Pan syndrome. I don’t ever want to lose my innocence or my dreams.” Duvall was a two-time Emmy nominee for her children’s TV productions.
After the turn of the millennium, the actress stepped out of the spotlight and did not work in movies for 20 years after the release of 2002’s Manna from Heaven.
In 2016, Duvall made an appearance on the Dr. Phil show that was widely criticized at the time as being exploitative of her mental health struggles. “I found out the kind of person he is the hard way,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2021 of Dr. Phil host Phil McGraw.
Duvall returned to film in the 2023 independent horror movie The Forest Hills, which she filmed remotely and was directed over Zoom by writer-producer-director Scott Goldberg. “Acting again—it’s so much fun. It enriches your life,” she told PEOPLE in 2023.
Duvall was married to artist Bernard Sampson from 1970 until 1974 and later dated musician Paul Simon in the ’70s before she began dating her longtime partner Gilroy in the late 1980s.