'The Shining' Star Shelley Duvall Dead at 75
July 11 2024, Published 11:43 a.m. ET
Shelley Duvall has died just days after her 75th birthday following a battle with diabetes.
Hailed as one of the original "scream queens" due to her iconic role as permanently-petrified Wendy Torrance in The Shining, she passed away peacefully at home on Thursday, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
"My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us," Duvall's longtime partner Dan Gilroy confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. "Too much suffering lately, now she's free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley."
Duvall, born and raised in Texas, got her start when she was discovered by director Robert Altman in the 1970s. She appearing in films like 1971's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, 1974's Thieves Like Us, and 1975's Nashville, but her most famous role came when Stanley Kubrick cast her as Jack Torrance's tormented wife.
She was infamously terrorized nearly as much off-screen as on, with Kubrick intentionally isolating and antagonizing her during the making of The Shining and forcing her to perform the baseball bat sequence 127 times — a Guinness World Record for most takes of a scene with dialogue.
Kubrick had her "crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end," she revealed in a 1981 interview with PEOPLE. “I will never give that much again. If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”
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Duvall fled Hollywood to live a reclusive life in her native Texas in the mid-1990s, continuing to work sporadically before officially retiring from acting in 2002.
In November 2016, a disheveled Duvall shocked fans by discussing her mental health struggles on a controversial episode of Dr. Phil that some slammed as exploitative. The actress appeared paranoid and delusional as she publicly admitted, "I'm very sick. I need help."
She recently returned to the silver screen with a role in the low-budget indie horror flick The Forest Hills, which came out in 2023 but will see a wider release this spring.
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In what is now her final role, Duvall played Mama, the mother of a man "tormented by nightmarish visions after enduring head trauma."
"I wanted to act again. And then this guy kept calling, and so I wound up doing it," she told The New York Times of her miraculous comeback.
"She was able to bring her acting abilities to the table and deliver her lines and bring the character of Mama to life," The Forest Hills director Scott Goldberg added. "She was one hundred percent a natural. It was as if time never passed."