It was Shelley Duvall’s destiny to become most widely known for a single film or maybe for a single poster image from it, shockingly and cartoonishly explicit. The image certainly did justice to her intensity and capacity for utterly unselfconscious performance, but said nothing about the subtlety, strength, wit and unfakable superstar quality that otherwise marked her work.
This was her Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in 1980, playing the terrified wife of Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, marooned together in a haunted offseason hotel. To the right of the poster’s frame, Duvall’s wide-open eyes and mouth – black chasms of fear, an almost supernatural and faintly eroticised image. To the left, the grinningly crazy face of Nicholson as he crashes through the door with an axe, intent on killing her. For many, the image came to epitomise the sexual politics of Hollywood that shaped (but did not destroy) Duvall’s career. For all that he’s sweatily deranged, Nicholson looks relaxed and enjoying himself. Duvall looks genuinely afraid, a testament of course to her talent, but it’s uncomfortable to perceive given what we later found out about the toll that The Shining took on her, endless takes and punishing schedules without a word of emollient praise, having to deal with those alpha males Kubrick and Nicholson.
