Scotsman Obituaries: Shelley Duvall, actor best known for starring roles in The Shining and Popeye

She will be forever remembered for the image on the iconic poster of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece The Shining, looking like she is trying to imitate Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, as unhinged husband Jack Nicholson breaks through the door with an axe.

She was nominated for the Worst Actress award at the inaugural Golden Raspberries only for the organisers to withdraw the nomination 40 years later after allegations that Kubrick had bullied and cajoled her throughout the production.

“We have since discovered that Duvall's performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of her throughout the production," said their statement, though it is a director’s job to impact the actors’ performances.

Perhaps the role for which she seemed most obviously suited was that of Olive Oyl in Popeye, one of several films she made with director Robert Altman. Duvall was never a classic romantic leading lady, but perfect for the role of the lanky love interest in the life of the spinach-guzzling sailor-man, played by Robin Williams.

Duvall retired from acting at the end of the 1990s and lived a reclusive life largely away from the glare of Hollywood. She struggled with mental health issues in recent years and died in her sleep from complications from diabetes. “Too much suffering lately, now she’s free,” said her long-time partner Dan Gilroy in a statement after her death.

The oldest of four children, she was born Shelley Alexis Duvall in 1949 in Fort Worth, Texas, though she grew up mainly in Houston. Her father was a lawyer, her mother an estate agent. She had early thoughts of a career in science, which she studied at college, but dropped out after being disgusted by the vivisection of a monkey.

A chance encounter with some film people at a party in Houston led to a meeting with Robert Altman, who cast in her in his black comedy Brewster McCloud as the main character’s girlfriend.

She had no acting experience at all and was highly sceptical, but Altman persuaded her to give it a go. She later said Altman simply encouraged her to be her larger-than-life self on screen.

She was only 20 at the time and had never been outside Texas, but became a regular in his movies during the 1970s, with roles in the western McCabe and Mrs Miller, Thieves Like Us, the epic drama Nashville, in which she is meant to be in Nashville to comfort a dying relative but is more focused on sex, and 3 Women, for which she won the Best Actress award at Cannes.

Duvall had mixed feelings about playing Olive Oyl in Popeye. As a child she was teased her for her resemblance to Olive. “It meant you were skinny as a rail, you had sparrow legs, and an Adam’s apple. I mean, who wants to admit she was born to play Olive Oyl?” she said.

She had a small role as an empty-headed music journalist in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, memorably describing sex with Allen’s character as “Kafkaesque”. While making the film she met Paul Simon, who also had a small part in it. They began a relationship and moved in together. Duvall later introduced Simon to the Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher. Simon and Fisher began a relationship and he announced he was dumping Duvall just as she was about to head to England to begin filming The Shining with Kubrick.

So she was already emotionally fragile when she began work with the famously perfectionist director, who took a very different approach from Altman’s “just be yourself” and demanded dozens of takes of individual scenes. The film took over a year to shoot and was an emotionally draining experience for Duvall, who found it so stressful that her hair started falling out. “Jack [Nicholson] had to be angry all the time, and I had to be in hysterics all the time,” she said. For one climactic scene Kubrick reportedly demanded 127 takes, seemingly because he wanted to Duvall to be genuinely on the point of dropping with exhaustion.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of Kubrick’s approach the end result was a box-office hit and a film that is now recognised as one of the best and most terrifying horror thrillers of all time. Duvall hated Kubrick at the time, but later acknowledged his approach worked in creating a masterpiece.

During the 1980s she appeared in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, Tim Burton’s short Frankenweenie, and Roxanne, a modern-day spin on Cyrano de Bergerac, with Duvall serving as confidante to Steve Martin’s Cyrano. She also produced and hosted a series of programmes for children on the developing medium of cable and satellite television, beginning with Faerie Tale Theatre, which reinterpreted old classics, with famous guest actors including Joan Collins, Liza Minnelli and Carrie Fisher.

She made fewer films in the 1990s and disappeared off the scene completely in the early 2000s, which in itself prompted media interest and speculation. It transpired that she was struggling with mental health issues. In 2016 she was persuaded to appear on US daytime talk show Dr Phil. She looked dishevelled and was clearly confused, insisting that Robin Williams was shapeshifting rather than dead and that she was being watched by aliens “I’m very sick, I need help,” she said. The show was billed as “A Hollywood Star’s Descent Into Mental Illness” and was widely condemned as exploitative.

Conspiracy theorists pinned the blame for her mental state on Stanley Kubrick, who was also dead by then, and on the nature of the film The Shining itself. However, Duvall had had a series of more recent upsets and traumas, including an earthquake in 1994 that damaged her house in Los Angeles, put her in fear of her life and was at least partly responsible for her return to live in Texas.

She was briefly married to an artist in the 1970s and is survived by Dan Gilroy, a musician and her partner for over 30 years. She did not have any children.

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