Remembering Shelley Duvall: In ‘The Shining’ and the Movies of Robert Altman, She Showed Us the Quirkiness of Our Normality
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic When Shelley Duvall was cast to play Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980), the film she would become most famous for, it was overwhelmingly the most mainstream movie she’d ever done — but more to the point, it was the most mainstream character.
Duvall, who died July 11 at 75, had spent the better part of a decade playing vibrant kooks and eccentrics in Robert Altman movies (and in case you think “kook” sounds pejorative, there was never anything pejorative about it when Shelley Duvall played one).
She had also rocked that cameo in “Annie Hall” as a Rolling Stone reporter who dates Alvy Singer and says, “Sex with you is really a Kafakesque experience.” But in “The Shining,” Duvall, with her feather voice and beaming doll-like features, was suddenly called on to incarnate the essence of normality.
And she did it as if born to it. She played Wendy in long black lank hair, toning down her natural Texas drawl to something that sounded more neutral and Midwestern.
Read more on variety.com