Shelley Duvall, Known For 'The Shining,' Altman Films, Dies At 75: Reports

LOS ANGELES, CA — Shelley Duvall, known for her frequent roles in Robert Altman films and for co-starring in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," died Thursday at 75, her partner told media outlets.

Duvall died in her sleep of complications from diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas.

“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” her longtime partner Dan Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter.

Born in Texas, Duvall had never left the state before she was discovered by Altman, for whom she went to on to become an essential collaborator, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Beginning with 1970's "Brewster," Duvall in a total of seven Altman films: "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," "Thieves Like Us," "Nashville," "Buffalo Bill and the Indians," "3 Women" and "Popeye."

“He offers me ... good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him. I remember the first advice he ever gave me: ‘Don’t take yourself seriously.’”

Duvall won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress and was nominated for a BAFTA award for her role in "3 Women," in which she played a socially inept woman who befriends and pursues an increasingly bizarre relationship with a teenager (Sissy Spacek).

That same year she also had a role in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall."

But one of her most memorable performances was that of the tormented wife of Jack Nicholson's psychotic, axe-wielding character in "The Shining." Her screamingly animated performance came after being pushed by demanding director Stanley Kubrick; it took more than a year to shoot the movie. Some of the scenes took more than 100 takes and the baseball sequence is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most takes of a scene with dialogue.

She told the Hollywood Reporter years later about how difficult it was to make "The Shining."

"After a while, your body rebels. It says: 'Stop doing this to me. I don't want to cry every day.' And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I'd be like, 'Oh no, I can't, I can't.' And yet I did it. I don't know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, `I don't know how you do it," she said.

Among her other roles were Terry Gilliam's "Time Bandits" and the comedy "Roxanne" with Steve Martin.

By the 1990s, Duvall began retiring from acting, After 2002's “Manna From Heaven," she didn't appear in another film for over two decades. In 2023, she starred in the indie horror movie "The Forest Hills," which was not widely available.

Duvall gave her first interview in many years to the New York Times earlier this year, in which she discussed the "violence" of rumors about her that centered around the archetype of the aging, female Hollywood recluse, sparked by concerns of her mental health.

“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime” — she snapped her fingers — “they turn on you?” Duvall told the Times. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”

City News Service and the Associated Press contributed to this report.