What Occurred to “The Shining” Actress Shelly Duvall, Who Vanished From Hollywood.
What made her so charming then (the movie critic Pauline Kael referred to as her the “feminine Buster Keaton”) nonetheless exists: a uncooked honesty, an intuitive high quality and a winsome Texas drawl.
“I keep in mind, on ‘Saturday Evening Reside,’” Mr. Gilroy mentioned, “they did a joke wherein they have been in some form of room and you possibly can hear the neighbors proper via the wall, and one of many strains was, “These partitions are thinner than Shelley Duvall!”
Her disappearance wasn’t, because it had been rumored, born of a protracted breakdown brought on years earlier than by her remedy on the set of “The Shining.” In actual fact, she continues to have solely good issues to say about that intense yearlong shoot in London and her admiration for Mr. Kubrick. As an alternative, the pause could also be extra precisely, although not definitively, attributed to the emotional influence of two occasions: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which broken her Los Angeles dwelling, and the worrying toll of certainly one of her brothers falling ailing, which prompted her return to her native Texas three a long time in the past.
It might additionally equally be attributed to the curse of fame: It isn’t sufficient to be well-known; one should repeatedly stoke the hearth. Depart it for too lengthy, particularly should you start to “age out” as a girl within the trade, and a profession will wane.
In 1982, two years after “The Shining” made her a family identify, Ms. Duvall began her personal manufacturing firm, Platypus (and, later, one other referred to as Assume Leisure), creating tv exhibits for kids, most notably “Faerie Story Theatre.” Every episode boasted an all-star solid: Robin Williams, Christopher Reeves, Carol Kane, Bud Cort, Bernadette Peters, and Mick Jagger, amongst them. The general impact was certainly one of baroque enjoyable, or as Time journal proclaimed, it supplied “a hip, witty twist to storybook classics.”
