Shelley Duvall vanished From Hollywood. She's been here the whole time. After two decades, the actress known for her roles in era defining films like “The Shining” and “Nashville” has returned to acting. But what happened to her? Shelley Duvall, who was once a fixture in Hollywood, can be found these days driving around Texas in her Toyota 4Runner.Credit.
Because of health issues, including diabetes and an injured foot that has greatly impacted her mobility (“My left one, like that Daniel Day-Lewis movie,” she joked), Ms. Duvall often stays in her 4Runner, some days driving to local nature spots, catching up with people in town and visiting drive-throughs. The driver’s seat is the only open space, as the interior is cluttered with takeout cartons and empty coffee cups. Ms. Duvall has not appeared in a movie since 2002, but she is making a comeback with a film scheduled to be released this spring.
For more than two decades, Ms. Duvall’s career was at a standstill. Her last film role had come in 2002’s “Manna From Heaven,” after which she retired for reasons that have remained a mystery from a varied and, by most counts, successful career as both an actor and producer. Among the most common questions that show up when you search her name these days: What happened to Shelley Duvall? and Why did Shelley Duvall disappear?
It intrigues Shelley Duvall as well.
“I was a star; I had leading roles,” she said, solemnly shaking her head. She had parked in the town square for a takeout lunch — chicken salad, quiche and sweetened iced coffee, finished off with a drag of a Parliament. She lowered her voice. “People think it’s just aging, but it’s not. It’s violence.”
“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime” — she snapped her fingers — “they turn on you? You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”
“Everyone’s always interested in downfall stories,” said Mr. Gilroy, 76, her partner of more than 30 years, who helps her get in and out of her car and sometimes has to plead with her to come back into the house. His voice bore a tone of weariness in discussing the speculation and gossip that still surrounds Ms. Duvall, focusing not only on her mental health, but also her body.
“It’s all over the internet: ‘Look at her now’ and ‘You won’t believe what she looks like now.’ Every celebrity gets that treatment.”
He has reason to feel weary, of course: In 2016, Ms. Duvall was a guest on the daytime talk show “Dr. Phil,” with the rare television appearance proving to be personally disastrous. Still controversial eight years later, the episode, filmed at the local Best Western without Mr. Gilroy’s knowledge — “I found out days later from people in town that it had happened,” Mr. Gilroy said — showed Ms. Duvall in a state of distress.
“I’m very sick. I need help,” Ms. Duvall told Dr. Phil in one clip. He responded: “Well, that’s why I’m here.”
The episode was titled “A Hollywood Star’s Descent Into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall.” Wide-eyed, Ms. Duvall went on to utter a slew of bizarre statements, such as claiming to be receiving messages from a “shapeshifting” Robin Williams, who had died two years before, and talking about malevolent forces who were out to do her harm. While the show’s stated aim was one of empowerment and destigmatizing mental illness, many, including Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian, publicly criticized the show for being exploitative and sensationalist.
Although the episode never aired in full, the damage was done. It led to questions regarding her mental state, and she withdrew further into herself.
"It did nothing for her,” said Mr. Gilroy, of the show. “It just put her on the map as an oddity.”
‘The Female Buster Keaton’
While these days it is rare for actresses to show their age on or off screen, Ms. Duvall has aged naturally. With her fine gray hair coaxed into three bright scrunchies on top of her head, and, in a faded pink tracksuit, the Ms. Duvall of today cuts a strikingly different figure to the waif who bewitched filmgoers throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
But her smile is still expressive and kind, her wispy eyebrows often arching to emphasize certain points, to make the listener laugh and win them over. She has an almost cartoonish physicality, with doleful eyes and a goofy humor. This was the woman who once dated Paul Simon and Ringo Starr and worked with some of the era’s most famous directors: Robert Altman, Terry Gilliam and Mr. Kubrick, among them. Her sharp fashion sense — miniskirts, winklepickers, spidery eyelashes — earned her the nickname “Texas Twiggy.”
What made her so captivating then (the film critic Pauline Kael called her the “female Buster Keaton”) still exists: a raw honesty, an intuitive quality and a winsome Texas drawl.
Her disappearance wasn’t, as it had been rumored, born of a protracted breakdown caused years before by her treatment on the set of “The Shining.” In fact, she continues to have only good things to say about that intense yearlong shoot in London and her admiration for Mr. Kubrick. Instead, the pause may be more accurately, though not definitively, attributed to the emotional impact of two events: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged her Los Angeles home, and the stressful toll of one of her brothers falling ill, which prompted her return to her native Texas three decades ago.
It could also equally be attributed to the curse of fame: It isn’t enough to be famous; one must continuously stoke the fire. Leave it for too long, especially if you begin to “age out” as a woman in the industry, and a career will wane.
After more than two decades, Ms. Duvall is set to make a return to movies this spring in “The Forest Hills.”
Ms. Duvall plays Mama, the mother of Rico (Chiko Mendez), a man who, according to the film’s logline, is “tormented by nightmarish visions after enduring head trauma.” The film also features Edward Furlong (“Terminator 2”), another actor who has spent a long time away from the spotlight.
Taking her restricted mobility into consideration, the crew traveled to Texas from their main location in upstate New York on three occasions, so that Ms. Duvall could perform her scenes from home. There was a lot of technical problem-solving. For instance, her wheelchair, which Ms. Duvall uses when she isn’t in the car, became part of the story. When asked how she came to be involved in the project, Ms. Duvall shrugged: “I wanted to act again. And then this guy kept calling, and so I wound up doing it.”
If the crew had any qualms working with Ms. Duvall, they were immediately soothed. “She was able to bring her acting abilities to the table and deliver her lines and bring the character of Mama to life,” the director Scott Goldberg, for whom this will be his third feature, said on a recent phone call. “She was one hundred percent a natural. It was as if time never passed.”
Ms. Duvall mused: “If you ever do a horror film, other horror films are going to come to you, no matter what you do.”
“It was great, all those years in L.A., really terrific,” said Mr. Gilroy. “And when we moved, after the earthquake, it was terrific in Texas. Things went downhill when she started becoming afraid of things, maybe didn’t want to work. It’s really hard to pin it on any one thing.”
Ms. Duvall, once praised for her great imagination, was now being haunted by it. “She became paranoid and just kind of delusional, thinking she was being attacked,” said Mr. Gilroy. “She tried to make calls to the F.B.I., and asked our neighbor to protect us.”
Pets have always been a big part of Ms. Duvall’s life and she currently has three parrots, a few cats and a geriatric mutt called Puppy. Passing by a field of thin-looking donkeys on the way home, Ms. Duvall often stops to feed them a couple of slices of sandwich bread through the wire fence. Her innate connection to the natural world lends to a sense of wonderment.
Shelly Duvall is very much alive and ready to show the world that she has a lot more magic to give...
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