Shelley Duvall, the actor who starred in classic films ranging from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Robert Altman’s live-action version of Popeye, died Thursday at her home in Blanco. She was 75.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Duvall died in her sleep due to complications from diabetes, Gilroy said.
The actor recently celebrated a birthday on July 7 with Sarah Lukowski, an Austin woman who was an avid fan and became her friend over peach cobbler at a restaurant in the Texas Hill Country, where Duvall lived away from the spotlight after a 32-year career in Hollywood.
“She said it was a fantastic day because of all the goodies and cards I brought,” Lukowski wrote on X of her recent visit to Duvall’s home. “We had lots of laughs and many hugs.”
Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in Fort Worth on July 7, 1949. She was the daughter of a real estate broker mother and a cattle auctioneer father, who later practiced law. The family, which included three younger brothers, moved around Texas but settled in Houston when Duvall was a girl.
Duvall was discovered, by three crew members on Altman’s 1970 film Brewster McCloud, at a Houston art show for her then-fiancé, Bernard Sampson. The crew invited her to bring Sampson’s artwork to a gathering, according to the Los Angeles Times, where she first met Altman and the film’s producer Lou Adler.
“The paintings weren’t great—but her sales pitch was,” Adler told the Times in 1991. “She had the most amazing amount of energy I’d ever seen in anyone. She looked like a flower; her face was painted with marks around her eyes to accent them. She was overwhelming.”
Duvall’s thin frame and striking looks—including her spidery eyelashes—made her an unusual beauty whose on-screen presence was intensely watchable.
The young woman, who’d never been out of Texas, was eventually cast in Brewster McCloud and went on to star in many more films directed by Altman, including 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1974’s Thieves Like Us, 1975’s Nashville, and 1977’s 3 Women.
By the 1980s, Duvall was being cast in leading roles—as Olive Oyl in Popeye; as Jack Nicholson’s tormented wife, Wendy Torrance, in the adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining—and in other roles, including in the fantasy film Time Bandits and the Steve Martin–led comedy Roxanne.
“When somebody recognizes you at a Dairy Queen in Texas,” Duvall told People magazine in 1981, “you’re a star.”
Duvall launched Think Entertainment, which produced children’s programming, in 1987. She also created Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre, a live-action fantasy show for kids that depicted the stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.
“Producing allows you to take control of your life,” Duvall said in another interview with 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. . . . 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 eventually left the entertainment industry, retreating by the mid-1990s to the Texas Hill Country. In 2016, Duvall revealed that she suffered from mental illness, including anxiety attacks and paranoia, during an appearance on the Dr. Phil show that was widely criticized for being exploitative.
“I found out the kind of person he is the hard way,” she told the Hollywood Reporter in 2021, in a profile that revealed how beloved she was by her neighbors in the small towns west of the Interstate 35 corridor.
Lukowski had recently started collecting fan mail for Duvall, delivering and reading it to her during their visits. “I feel like she needed more support,” she told Texas Monthly last week. “I opened a P.O. box to bring her some joy and smiles and words of encouragement. . . . It always brings a smile to her face.”
Spending time with Duvall, Lukowski said, “reminds me how we’re all human.”
“We all go through trials and errors and ups and downs in our life. But at the end of the day, we still have our own passions,” she said, days before Duvall died. “Shelley’s been through a lot, but she’s still so kind and compassionate. That’s really what I admire the most about her, because you can see that throughout her career, she’s still the same Shelley.”
