The story of Shelley Duvall’s rich and varied career as an actress and producer, which ended with her death on July 11, less than a week after her 75th birthday.He birthday — begins before the first movie he appears in. It begins, in a very real sense, with MIXthe 1970 film in which director Robert Altman definitively broke his officer shackles and cooked up a more subversive film than what novice filmmakers of a younger generation were just beginning to cook up. The comedy of a perpetually stressed-out team of doctors in the Korean War had outrageous sight gags often involving spurts of blood that Peckinpah couldn’t conceive of. It poked fun at religious hypocrisy, sexual hang-ups and pretty much any topic it deigned to mention while turning Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland into counterculture heroes in the roles of Trapper John McCintyre and Hawkeye Pierce. I was there, and believe me, in the summer of 1970 it was the one movie everyone was talking about. At a time when every other movie aspired to turn the industry upside down, this one actually did it.
So Altman, bless his wicked heart, opted to stick with an absurdist comedy set in Texas. Brewster McCloudin which the main character aspires to escape the confines of the earth and become a birdman, flying around the closed Astrodome on wings he built himself. He is also linked to a series of murders involving strangulation and bird droppings. This film was not highly recommended by critics. In fact, it angered the group that raised it. MIX. (One of the kindest critics, the TimesVincent Canby lamented that the film did not have “enough wit to sustain more than a few isolated incidents.”) It thus went largely unnoticed. Those who kept the faith (and I, at age 11, was among them) were treated to several unusual scenes, including a statuesque Sally Kellerman bathing naked in Houston’s Mecom Fountain, Stacy Keach in old-age makeup not unlike that worn by Grandpa several years later in The Texas Chainsaw Massacreand most memorably, a lithe young woman with prominent teeth and hilariously full eyelashes, who is in love with our antihero.
She had been scouted by the film’s producers, who lived in Texas, including Tommy Thompson, an old friend of Altman’s, who advised Altman that he had to meet “that girl” when he got to Texas. Shelley Duvall was not an actress, she did not aspire to be an actress, but she was affiliated with the local art scene; her boyfriend was a painter, and her meeting with Altman was initially based on her non-genuine interest in buying some canvases. Altman did not believe Duvall’s lack of affectation at their first meeting: “I thought she was a liar.” […] “And I was very rude to her,” he recalled in an interview, but when he realized her wide-eyed Shelley attitude was genuine, he cast her in the film, playing a tour guide and giving her character, Suzanne Davis, Duvall’s own initials. It’s a joyous, what-you-see-is-what-you-get performance, in which her unusual magnetism adds a dimension of sincere feeling to this sometimes arrogant parody of American culture.
Was acting a suitable career for her? She didn’t really know, but she was entering her twenties and there wasn’t much to do. Altman gave her a small role in the 1971 film McCabe and Mrs. Milleran astonishing masterpiece that put him back in the good graces of critics and stirred the cinematic spirit almost as much as MIX She had a spectral presence as a young prostitute imported into a new brothel, and not much more than a presence, unfortunately. Altman gave Duvall her first starring role with Thieves like usa low-key, galvanically tragic period piece in which Bowie, a prison escapee — an arrogant but dim-witted Keith Carradine — romances Keechie (Duvall), the floppy-haired, chain-smoking daughter of a criminal accomplice. Keechie is a girl who likes to play vaguely tough, but she can’t contain an essential sweetness. Her smile lights up the room even though her eyes seem bent on doubting every damnable thing in her drab little world.
In Altman’s gigantic ensemble piece NashvilleDuvall struts in a different way as “LA Joan,” who shows up at the airport from California in tight, multicolored fabrics that make her look like an exploded set of pastel crayons. She’s ostensibly in town to visit a sick aunt, but immediately sets about picking up and bedding an assortment of starlets and wannabes without a second thought. As cartoonish as she often appears, she’s also genuinely sexy in an eccentric way. And her performance is expert: she reduces her natural warmth to less than a smidge. (She’s also peculiarly sexy in the Woody Allen film.) Annie Halltelling Allen’s Alvy Singer that a previous partner had called the act with her a “Kafkaesque experience.”)
His Altman apotheosis was in 1977. Three womenOne of the director’s periodic, intentional enigmas. As Millie, the chatty girl who can’t close a car door without getting her usually garish yellow dress caught in it, she captivates the wide-eyed teenager Pinky, played by Sissy Spacek. Spacek and Duvall were a potent combination: two unlikely stars of the 1970s, neither of whom had the conventional “look” of a movie goddess, but who were emblematic of a certain nonconformity in the creation of cinematic icons. Genuine stars of the genuinely cosmic kind, you might say.
Sensuality was completely denied her in her role as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation. The glowWendy, another chain smoker, dresses baggily and slovenly, and though the spark has clearly gone out in her marriage to failed novelist Jack long before they decamp to the Overlook Hotel for a traumatic winter, there’s something about Wendy’s initial “best of all” attitude when talking to children’s doctor Anne Jackson early in the film that suggests she might have been smitten with a quasi-literary charmer of the Torrance variety before little Danny came along.
The ultimately terrified character is one of Duvall’s most virtuoso performances and also, paradoxically, one of her most limited. Footage of her speaking to Kubrick on set shows the frowning director worrying about her every reaction, fearing she might seem “phony.” Interview with the BBC A year after the film was released, he reflected on his method: “I’d never done, say, more than 15 takes in my life. So it was a big change for me to do that many. After you do a certain number, it kind of shuts off. And five takes or so and then it comes alive on its own, and then you know the scene like the back of your hand and you can’t make mistakes with it. And you forget all reality other than what you’re doing. And it’s like a miracle, it comes out better than before.”
In that interview segment, Duvall hardly seems traumatized by her experience. In another interview with critic Michel Ciment in the same year, 1981, she fondly recalls playing chess with Kubrick on the set: “He put himself at a disadvantage, gave me his queen, and the bastard still won.” However, the urban myth persists that Kubrick’s treatment of her during the making of The glow The myth precipitated some of Duvall’s mental health crises earlier this century, crises from which many say he has recovered in recent years. The myth not only defames Kubrick, but distorts the dynamics on the set. The glowand misrepresents the entire wonderful career of Duvall and insults her intelligence, her professionalism and her acting ability.
Duvall came straight from the England squad. The glow to Malta, to play what some consider the character she was born to play: Olivia, in Altman’s immaculate live-action musical Popeyestarring Robin Williams in the title role. Paul Dooley, who plays Wimpy in the film, told me in an interview that when Duvall arrived she was more concerned about Kubrick’s treatment of lead actor Scatman Crothers in The glow She sat back and didn’t complain at all about her experience. A splendidly whimsical film with hidden depths; it’s not for nothing that Paul Thomas Anderson grafted Duvall’s standout musical number, “He Needed Me,” to a particularly painful scene in Drunk with love —Popeye‘s stature increases every year and will continue to do so.
As wonderful as Fred Schepisi’s 1987 one Cyrano de Bergerac modernization Roxana It looks like Duvall’s first “normal” film, with Shelley in a supporting role as Steve Martin’s helpful godmother. She spent much of her ’80s as creator and executive producer of the exciting children’s television show. Fairy tale theatrewhose idea came to him while filming PopeyeShe attracted a fantastically eclectic array of talent to work on the show, including a few Pythons (she has a hilarious cameo in Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film). Bandits of timemade right after Popeye) and Roger Vadim, a man who is not known for his work in family films, but who nevertheless did a fine job adapting a version of “Beauty and the Beast.” While her appearances on camera became less frequent, she never lost her popularity. One would have liked to see her appear in a more decisive film than the horror film that has not yet been released. The hills of the forestBut what we have is incredibly enriching, enigmatic and valuable. There was no one like her.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases for RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, AARP magazine. He occasionally blogs at the Daily Mail.Some came runningand tweets, mostly in jest, in@glenn__kennyHe is the author of the upcoming bookThe World Is Yours: The Story of ScarfacePublished by Hanover Square Press and now available for pre-order.
