Foto: imago/United Archives
The horror is written on her face. In the role of Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic “The Shining” (1980), Shelley Duvall flees through an abandoned hotel to escape her murderous husband Jack (Jack Nicholson). Only at the last moment does she and her little son manage to leave the place where long-dead people are up to mischief behind them. From the outside, Duvall looked as if she were made to play the young mother who had slid into disaster: big eyes, full lips and a delicate nose gave her an innocent look, which nevertheless had something exaggerated and uncanny about it. Trains that burn in. Duvall was wrongly nominated for the “Golden Raspberry” for her part in “Shining”: she is hardly inferior to Jack Nicholson, who plays as masterfully as usual. And that apparently came at a price: Duvall later described filming as traumatizing because, at Kubrick’s request, she had to repeat emotionally demanding scenes dozens of times.
Entering film history as the “Scream Queen” with “Shining,” Duvall was by no means limited to the horror genre as an actress. She also made seven films with the New Hollywood director Robert Altman, whose crew she had once discovered. For her role in his satirical psychodrama “Three Women” (1977) she received the Actor Prize in Cannes. At the beginning of the millennium, the sufferer of mental illness withdrew from the public eye; However, she returned to the screen again after more than 20 years for the horror film “The Forest Hills” (2023) by Scott Goldberg. It was to be her last film: Duvall died on July 11th at the age of 75 in her hometown of Texas.
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