Hollywood, 1970s. The end of the Hollywood studio system rids the industry of its very restrictive “star factories”: the way is clear for the atypical bodies, the strange faces that one might come across on the street, without the intervention of glamour. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, John Cazale for the men. Barbra Streisand, Sissy Spacek, Diane Keaton for women. In this regard, Shelley Duvall was an atypical beauty, completely eccentric: high cheekbones, huge eyeballs that, with her large front teeth, seemed to compete for human dominance. Her little mousy voice was making her a cartoon – somewhere between the model Twiggy, the muse of the sixties, and “Buster Keaton in the feminine”says critic Pauline Kael.
The actress died on Thursday July 11 in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas at the age of 75. Born in 1949 in Fort Worth, Texas, she was only 20 years old when Robert Altman (1925-2006) spotted her as a cosmetics salesman and offered her a role in Brewster McCloud (1970). Between 1970 and 1980, they made seven films together, including the amazing Nashville (1975). In this American film that is filmed like a distressed deer against the background of country music, Duvall is in his element. The filmmaker emphasizes the unreal aspect of his favorite actress by giving her the role of Olive, Olive’s companion Pope (1980).
But without a doubt he never understood as well as i was Three women (1977), a great stylistic exercise that looks towards European auteur cinema. She plays the strange Millie Lammoreaux, a real living doll, who is admired by her new colleague. She won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for this role that sticks to her: this candor that breaks the heart, this strange face that always separates her a little from the world, isolates her from the rest of the cast. Three women he said before Stanley Kubrick: try to reveal the imagination that is in Duvall, you will find there a heavy landscape, even the beginning of a David Lynch film.
Challenging filming by Kubrick
In 1980, after the bitter failure Barry LyndonKubrick takes the horror trend and adapts Stephen King’s latest novel, The Shining. In this story, where horror competes with the supernatural, a family separates under the influence of the father’s alcoholic madness, Jack Torrance. Kubrick chose Shelley Duvall against Jack Nicholson, the highest paid actor in Hollywood. Filming is extremely gruesome: fifty-six weeks, six days a week, up to sixteen hours a day and 35 per scene.