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Despite a prolific acting career that spanned more than five decades, Scream Queen Shelley Duvall’s net worth was relatively modest.
Duvall, whose most famous role was that of Wendy Torrance, the wife of Jack Nicholson’s ax-wielding maniac in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining, died on July 11 at the age of 75.
During her 53 years in the industry, the US actress starred in films across a variety of genres, though most were critical, rather than financial successes – and she took a lengthy hiatus from showbusiness in the early 2000s.
Estimates of Duvall’s net worth range from around $500,000 to $5m, according to a number of celebrity tracking sites. Though she starred in multiple classic films and worked with Hollywood giants, by her own admission she “didn’t get paid much – just scale plus 10 percent.”
"They thought women would just marry and the husband’s going to support them. But that doesn’t happen for everybody,” she told People in 2023.
Duval’s breakout role came in 1975 when she joined the ensemble cast of Robert Altman’s satirical musical comedy-drama film Nashville. The film was a box-office success, with theatrical rentals of $6.8m in North America by 1976.
Several years later in 1980, she landed two of her most memorable roles, Wendy Torrance, in The Shining, and Olive Oyl in the live-action musical comedy film Popeye.
Sadly, The Shining opened on the same weekend as The Empire Strikes Back but was released on 10 screens and grossed $622,337 for the four-day weekend – making it the third highest-grossing opening weekend from fewer than 50 screens of all time.
Popeye – in which she starred opposite Robin Williams – grossed a whopping $6m on its opening weekend in the US. In total the film earned just under $50m at the US box office — more than double the film’s budget — and a worldwide total of $60m.
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Duvall decided to step away from Hollywood in 2002 and retire in Central Texas, dropping out of the limelight almost entirely.
In 2016 however, she agreed to be interviewed on US daytime talk show Dr Phil, where she revealed that she had been struggling with mental illness. "I’m very sick, I need help," she said.
It was unclear how Duvall’s finances were faring at the time of the interview, but the distressing incident prompted a wave of sympathy from the industry.
Vivian Kubrick called the interview “appallingly cruel” and “exploitative,” and subsequently set up a GoFundMe page for the actress which, according to reports at the time, raised more than $100,000.
Duvall returned to acting and the public eye last year, with a role in the independent horror film The Forest Hills. It is not certain how much the film earned at the box office, or how much Duvall was paid for the role.
