Shelley Duvall has died, just days after her 75th birthday. “The Shining” actress died on Thursday, July 11, at her home in Blanco, Texas, her partner Dan Gilroy told The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. THR and The New York Times reported that Duvall died from complications of diabetes. Gilroy told THR, “My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.”
Director Scott Goldberg, who worked with Duvall on her final film, 2023’s The Forest Hills, tells PEOPLE, “Shelley leaves behind an amazing legacy and will be missed by so many people, myself included. I am proud of her for overcoming adversity to act again and will always be forever grateful for her friendship and kindness.”
Duvall was born July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth, Texas. She considered pursuing a career in science before she was “discovered” by three crew members on director Robert Altman‘s 1970 film “Brewster McCloud” at a party in Houston where Shelley’s then-fiancé Bernard Sampson was displaying artwork, according to the Los Angeles Times. The crew members invited Duvall to something of a secret casting call for Altman’s movie under the guise of an event featuring “art patrons” attended by the director. This led to Duvall’s first on-screen appearance in “Brewster McCloud.” She continued to work with the director, in films like in 1971’s “McCabe & Mrs. Miller,“ 1974’s “Thieves Like Us” and 1975’s “Nashville.”
“After Thieves Like Us, Robert looked at me and said, ‘I knew you were good, but I didn’t know you were great,’ “ she told PEOPLE in 2023. “It’s the reason I stuck with it and became an actress.” Duvall went on to appear in more than a dozen movies and television shows over the course of the ’70s, including an appearance in 1977’s “Annie Hall,” before she made her best-known movie: Stanley Kubrick‘s 1980 horror masterpiece “The Shining.”
The film, which required a 56-week shoot and holds a Guinness World Record for “most retakes for one scene with dialogue,” starred Duvall and Jack Nicholson in an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel of the same name. “[Kubrick] doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take. Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard,” the actress told The Hollywood Reporter as she recalled her experiences filming “The Shining” in February 2021. “And full performance from the first rehearsal. That’s difficult.” In order to get herself into the right headspace, Duvall said she would “listen to sad songs” before each scene or “just think about something very sad in your life or how much you miss your family and friends.”
“But 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,” she added. “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 [Nicholson] said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.'”
“The Shining” made Duvall a household name. “When somebody recognizes you at a Dairy Queen in Texas you’re a star,” she told PEOPLE in 1981. Duvall tallied some 40 more television and film roles in the two-plus decades after The Shining’s release, and she turned toward producing in the ’80s with children’s anthology series like Tall Tales & Legends and Faerie Tale Theatre, the latter of which she convinced stars like Robin Williams, Teri Garr, Jeff Bridges, Mick Jagger and Liza Minnelli to appear on, according to the Los Angeles Times. The series won her a Peabody Award in 1984.
Duvall made her return to film in the 2023 independent horror movie “The Forest Hills,“ which she filmed remotely and was directed over Zoom by writer-producer-director Scott Goldberg. “Acting again — it’s so much fun. It enriches your life,” she told PEOPLE in 2023.
Duvall was married to artist Bernard Sampson from 1970 until 1974, and later dated musician Paul Simon in the ’70s before she began dating her longtime partner Gilroy in the late 1980s.
