It’s going to be all The Shining all the time, but the lead sentence of Shelley Duvall’s obit should be that she appeared in 3 Women and Annie Hall *in the same year* and turned in indelible performances (part of making the artistic registry is doing something no one else could have done the same or better and her brief moments in Woody Allen’s masterpiece are unimprovable). And if Robert Altman considered her an essential part of many movies, that speaks volumes.
Her whole vibe was sui generis, and she leaned into her eccentricities and while embracing them, transcended them. Most beautiful? Most talented? Not even close, but she was authentic, and that is plain on the screen, nothing time or trends can do to depreciate it.
Yes, she was done dirty by Stanley Kubrick who, during The Shining (there is no other movie I adore and despise with equal fervor) reached the full flowering of his self-crippling OCD and megalomania, coupled with repugnant misogyny (read about his treatment of Duvall if you’ve not done so and be duly disgusted), and pour one out for an actress who took one for the team, hung in there as best she could, and gave us the ultimate meme-worthy performance. In a movie filled with cardboard cut-out characters and in which subtlety is treated like an infectious disease, Duvall is nothing if not human, but more, humane, very much a Mama Bear and yes, it’s acting, but it’s also something redemptory, a light that even Kubrick’s gleeful sadism couldn’t extinguish.
She left her mark, and here’s hoping she rests well. #RIP
