Shelly Duvall dead at 75 by whozit

CINEMA

Shelly Duvall dead at 75

POSTED BY: WHOZIT
UPDATED: Wednesday, July 17, 2024 15:09
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Thursday, July 11, 2024 4:05 PM

WHOZIT

https://variety.com/2024/film/news/shelly-duvall-dead-the-shining-nasv
ille-1236067312

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Thursday, July 11, 2024 5:07 PM

BRENDA

Sorry to hear that. I know who she is but I don't think I've seen anything she worked in.

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Thursday, July 11, 2024 6:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

She was a bit before my time, but I'd seen a few things she was in. Sadly, Popeye was one of them, although she probably was the perfect casting choice for Olive Oil.

I did not care much for either version of The Shining, but her acting in the tense scenes was pretty phenomenal. I heard that a lot of that fear was real, especially in the scene with the baseball bat.

Stanley Kubrick was allegedly pretty seriously abusive toward her when getting her fired up for that take.

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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.

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Friday, July 12, 2024 1:15 PM

BRENDA

I've seen "Popeye" too and I wasn't overly thrilled with it. My brother liked Robin Williams hence the renting of this film at the time.

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Friday, July 12, 2024 2:11 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Searching for Shelley Duvall: The Reclusive Icon on Fleeing Hollywood and the Scars of Making ‘The Shining’

After leaving L.A., and making only one public appearance since, on a widely condemned mental illness episode of 'Dr. Phil,' the complicated actress sat down for a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter about her legacy and the trauma of the Stanley Kubrick film.

BY SETH ABRAMOVITCH | FEBRUARY 11, 2021

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/feature/searching-for-shelley-duvall
-the-reclusive-icon-on-fleeing-hollywood-and-the-scars-of-making-the-shining-4130256/

Out on the tranquil banks of a river in Texas Hill Country, Shelley Duvall pulls up in a white Toyota 4Runner. Her favorite place to sit is in the driver’s seat. It’s also the only place to sit: The rest of the car is filled from floor to roof with a crush of acquisitions, including a bucket of plastic silverware, a jar of Green Giant sliced mushrooms and a bouquet of silk roses. Duvall, 71, passes entire days in her car, chatting with locals and snacking on takeout food. She shares a home in the area with Dan Gilroy, 76, a member of the early Madonna band Breakfast Club. Gilroy was briefly romantically linked to the singer but has been with Duvall since 1989, the two having fallen in love while co-starring in the Disney Channel movie Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme. Produced by Duvall, it featured an all-star cast (including Duvall’s former boyfriend Paul Simon) and has become an abiding cultural touchstone among millennials.

There’s little chance that any passersby would recognize Duvall as Little Bo Peep from that movie — or, for that matter, as Wendy Torrance from The Shining, the part for which she is best known. Her hair has thinned and grayed, her breathy, Minnie Mouse voice gone gravelly (she chain-smokes Parliaments) and her trademark stick figure — the one she used to full advantage playing Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s Popeye — has filled out. But there are tells. Her eyes still sparkle, even from a distance. And her toothy grin is warm and familiar.

Duvall arrives making jokes and raving about the cherry scones at the cafe next door. A waitress skips down the steps with one in hand and passes it to her through the car window. “Heaven,” Duvall says as she takes a bite. Later, the waitress, Kristina Keller, a 50-something with a Texas twang, pulls me aside. “I’m not sure who you are,” she says. “But out here amongst these rural Hill Country communities, we look out for each other and we take care of each other. Does that make sense?”

The locals are fond of Duvall, to them more of an eccentric aunt than faded movie star. They’re also protective of her — particularly since 2016, when Phil McGraw and his Dr. Phil crew descended on the town to shoot a disturbing interview with Duvall, during which she babbled free-associative nonsense and disclosed paranoid fantasies. (Among them, she insisted her Popeye co-star Robin Williams, who died by suicide in 2014 after suffering from delusions, was still alive and “a shapeshifter.”) The episode was met with near-universal condemnation of Dr. Phil. “Everybody was appalled,” Keller recalls. “It just came across as craven and sensational.”

For Duvall’s many fans — and even her closest Hollywood friends — that shocking Dr. Phil appearance was the first they’d seen or heard from her since she fled Hollywood during the mid-1990s. The circumstances around that move remain unclear. She was at that point coming off a run as a highly successful and prolific producer who’d trailblazed cable TV with her offbeat approach to children’s programming. It all began with Faerie Tale Theatre, a very ahead-of-its-time anthology series that ran from 1982 to 1987 and saw major stars like Mick Jagger, Jeff Bridges and Carrie Fisher performing in classic stories directed by the likes of Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola. Every aspect of the show was overseen by Duvall.

Among those watching Dr. Phil that day was Lee Unkrich, the director of such Oscar-winning Pixar films as Toy Story 3 and Coco. Unkrich, 53, also is the world’s foremost Shining aficionado and is currently putting the final touches on a Taschen book about the making of the Stanley Kubrick horror classic. He had been searching for Duvall for years, to no avail; what he saw dismayed him. “Unfortunately, on Dr. Phil, the world saw what it’s like to have untreated mental illness,” Unkrich says. It’s the enduring stigma around it, he adds, “that has helped make Shelley mostly forgotten by Hollywood.”

Undaunted, Unkrich continued his search for Duvall, whose location was never disclosed by the Dr. Phil show. He finally located her in Texas two years ago and made a pilgrimage to show her a trove of Shining photos from Kubrick’s archive: “I was really curious to see how she would react and the stories that it might draw out of her.” Unkrich was pleased to find that the Duvall on Dr. Phil was just one part of a bigger picture. Yes, she could be gripped by anxiety attacks or meander into unsettling descriptions of alien-surveillance programs. But she also could converse for long, coherent stretches and conjure up the slightest details about her life and of her career, of which she remains very proud.

I made the same pilgrimage to meet Duvall on a warm January morning in 2021, unsure of what I would find when I got there. I only knew that it didn’t feel right for McGraw’s insensitive sideshow to be the final word on her legacy. Her mood ebbed and flowed throughout the day, but, like Unkrich, I found her memory to be sharp and her stories engrossing.

At one point, as I stood a pandemic-safe distance from her car window grilling her about Altman and Kubrick and her Shining co-star Jack Nicholson, Duvall narrowed her gaze and asked, “What’s your angle?” The question — pointed and savvy — made me laugh. It was clear she could still play the game, rendering me a little tongue-tied in the process.

Apart from her two decades in Hollywood, Duvall has spent her life in the same 200-mile Texas radius. She was born in Fort Worth on July 7, 1949, to Bob and Bobbie Duvall. After having three more children, all boys, the couple eventually settled in Houston. Her father was a cattle auctioneer who later became a criminal lawyer. Her mother was a successful real estate agent. “She founded her own company in Houston — Space City Realty,” Duvall notes proudly. “NASA was just being built.” Duvall’s father died in 1995 at age 74; her mother died only last March after contracting the COVID-19 virus. “Just after she turned 92,” she says. “That was a big one.” As for her three younger brothers, Scott, Shane and Stewart, “I don’t know where they are. They’re always off doing something. Shane’s on a fishing boat. Stewart sings with a friend of his named Mitch. Classic, huh?”

In high school, Duvall was a straight-A student who envisioned one day becoming a scientist. Around the 11th grade, however, her grades began to slip as she discovered a taste for boys — she dated a long-haired greaser who drove a Mustang — and developed an iconoclastic style (white go-go boots, a pageboy haircut and giant false eyelashes). Her science dreams ended when she dropped out of South Texas Junior College in Houston after witnessing a monkey vivisection. “So I went to work at Foley’s department store. Ladies would come up to the counter, and I’d tie scarves for them and show them how to look pretty. I’d come home smelling like a lily,” she says, puffing on a cigarette. “And I did some modeling — not much.” It was enough, however, to introduce her to her first (and only) husband — a pretty, long-haired artist named Bernard Sampson. “We met at a benefit for the astronauts that crashed,” Duvall remembers, referring to the 1967 Apollo 1 disaster. “I was modeling a Rudi Gernreich bathing suit, the kind with the cutouts.”

It was in service of Sampson’s career that Duvall made the contact that would change her life. They were living at Sampson’s parents’ house at the time, and Duvall threw a party there in the hope of selling some of his works and making enough money to move out. Among the attendees were three crewmembers of Brewster McCloud, Altman’s follow-up to his 1970 comedy hit M*A*S*H. Taken with Duvall’s looks and amused by her enthusiastic sales pitch, they played along, telling her to bring the paintings over to a couple of “art patrons” — what actually was a covert audition for Altman and Lou Adler, his producer.

Much more, including photos of Duvall at 72, at https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/feature/searching-for-shelley-duvall
-the-reclusive-icon-on-fleeing-hollywood-and-the-scars-of-making-the-shining-4130256/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Wednesday, July 17, 2024 3:09 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

also did Time Bandits as 'Pansy'

Sad, it looked like she snapped or something popped inside her brain on Dr Phil

but interesting actress

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