Shelley Duvall took an axe to her own career – now she’s making a comeback

Robert Altman’s muse is starring in low-budget horror ‘The Forest Hills’ – it’s her first film in two decades. Few are expecting it to match Duvall’s best films of the 1970s but, says Geoffrey Macnab, it’s still a welcome return

Duvall as Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’ in 1980 (Warner Bros/Hawk Films/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Few can forget the sheer terror on Shelley Duvall’s face when mad, bad Jack Nicholson comes after her in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). She cradles a baseball bat, tears staining her eyes, as he sidles toward her with maximum malevolence. She is the one squirming behind the door that he has just ripped open using an axe – it looks like he wants to dismember her with it too. “Here’s Johnny!” He grins devilishly as she retreats.

A documentary crew caught Kubrick losing his temper with Duvall, telling her she didn’t look “desperate enough” at Nicholson trying to kill her. Anyone who has seen the film will know this is a manifestly unfair criticism. When it comes to portraying raw fear on screen, she excelled. No rabbit in the headlights has ever looked quite as startled as she did in the film’s final scenes.

Duvall was the toothsome, big-eyed Texan who turned into one of the darlings of US independent filmmaking in the 1970s. She became a muse for director Robert Altman, who was the first to spot her potential and cast her in many of his films. In whatever role she played for Altman, whether a demure gangster’s moll, a groupie, a sex worker, or a nurse, she invariably combined Little Bo Peep-like innocence with a sense of counterculture mischief. Critics were bewildered by her artlessness but were often charmed too.