Shelley Duvall

Whaa? That's fucked-up if true...but, I will vote for 3 Women, if only because I think it's the best film listed there.

Paul Rudd wanted her for The Ten but heard that she was ill. That's all the news there is. The Texas mental hospital story seems to be from the IMDB chat forums.

I voted for 3 Women

ok i need a picture

ooooh http://www.celebsmoking.com/S_Duvall.jpg

http://gonemovies.com/WWW/Raketnet/Drama/AnniePam.jpg

intense face

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7uL9iYZTC8

god, she was so bad in the Shining. but i guess that was the point, no?

it's been ages since i've seen the shining, but one doesn't watch kubrick for the acting

</morbs>

I saw her being interviewed on something recently and she's put on a LOT on weight. She's like double the size now.

Gotta pick Popeye, who else would've been so perfect for Olive Oyl?

I haven't seen it in years admittedly but I'm going for "Thieves Like Us"

Thieves Like Us was just releaed on DVD; she's great enough to rival her work in 3 Women.

I saw her being interviewed on something recently and she's put on a LOT on weight. She's like double the size now.

so, up to 100 pounds then?

Yeah, I realised that as soon as I typed it. She's probably tripled or quadrupled in size. I thought it was Shelly Winters.

shelly duvall is in a mental home?!

:(

who else would've been so perfect for Olive Oyl?

Altmaan's first choice, Lily Tomlin? (admittedly Shelley was great tho) Pauline Kael wrote that Duvall looked like a Modigliani, not an EC Segar.

3 Women is the answer.

Thieves Like Us was just releaed on DVD

!!! Excellent news, I've been waiting for this.

I kinda love her in everything I've seen her in (which I think is everything up through Roxanne...? she's funny in that), this is hard to choose

I have kind of a weird crush on her...that is to say, I find her beautiful in an uncommon way.

She has the worst, the WORST, wardrobe ever in The Shining. But she's so good in it so there we go. I liked her in Annie Hall but she was in it for what, three? two minutes?

"I'm sorry I took so long"

and when he sang "but she breaks just like a little girl"...

heavy Marshall Brickman dialogue there (I doubt Woody could quote any Dylan song)

Diane probably told him about it.

I've always wondered who got the punk band for Hannah & Her Sisters, cuz they were actually quite good and I know Woody would never bother searching out an actual decent NY punk band

um i have a feeling a post i made here wound up on a probably really inappropriate thread

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I've only ever seen her in The Shining. She is great in that - I think part of it is her manga like looks which make one worry so much about her.

The oft-repeated story about how Kubrick was really mean to her to make her all stressed and so on in front of the camera is very unfortunate, as it implies she is unable to act.

i suppose if everyone could act there would be no need for directors

http://www.mondo-video.com/hello-im-shelley-duvall

This thread needs Shelley Duvall singing. Also it is way too short, unlike Shelley Duvall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFgj8mqPk0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrVoJgQ7u8w

one of my all-time favorite actresses. should watch Popeye with my kid one of these days...

that is just about the best thing ever, every single time. my cheeks hurt from smiling by the time she gets to her "first lady" pose/outfit.

She is the best. I think Popeye totally scrambled my brain, but I realize how important Shelley Duvall was to my personal development as a kid.

The only word for her is transplendent... she's transplendent!

Can only assume Brewster McCloud got no votes because nobody has actually seen it. She is dreamy in that movie, also ASTRODOME.

I love Brewster McCloud! And she is completely dreamy in it. But hard not to vote for 3 Women imo.

The thinking man's Vera (from Alice).

I guess I've seen roughly 75% of Shelley Duvall's filmography. Huh. Yeah, she's great.

And like a proper Altman mega-stan, I went out of my way years ago to find a video store with a VHS copy of Brewster McCloud. Worth it. Duvall appears in a huge chunk of my favorite Altman films.

Also, I saw The Shining at an unspeakably early age, so she's always had a certain maternal presence in my mind.

http://vimeo.com/39810781

her performance in 3 Women is just astonishing

http://img002.lazygirls.info/people/shelley_duvall/shelley_duvall_10689_nashville_005_434lo_49o6HVn.sized.jpg

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqfywwb4sN1qapakxo1_400.jpg

Shelley Duvall is crazy gorgeous.

just a few days ago saw 3 Women, which is streaming on Netflix, and now I want to watch it again.

Ummm...

http://jezebel.com/i-am-extremely-worried-about-shelley-duvall-1789075277

As you’ll recall, Duvall is best known for playing Olive Oyl in the delightfully strange Popeye as well as Jack Nicholson’s long-suffering wife Wendy in The Shining. She was also the host of Showtime’s live action Faerie Tale Theatre, a twinkling gem of a show that ran from 1982-1987 featuring live-action fairy tales directed by the likes of Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola. Really, great stuff. Shelley Duvall hasn’t been in the public eye for a while and after viewing this very brief preview for this week’s episode of Dr. Phil, I’m extremely worried about her well-being.

Shelley Duvall believes that Robin Williams is still alive, but as a shapeshifter. She believes the Sheriff of Nottingham has threatened her. She said something about a whirring disk in her leg and she’s trusting Dr. Phil to lead her towards recovery. Shelley Duvall doesn’t need Dr. Phil. Shelley Duvall needs actual help from a team of medical professionals, not a doctor that looks like a thumb with a mustache.

Yikes

sad. purposefully didn't click on any links to exploitative, shitty dr phil content.

Vivienne Kubrick is having none of it: https://twitter.com/ViKu1111/status/799099360374128640

Dear Dr. Phil

You are putting Shelley Duvall ‘on show’ while she is suffering from a pitiable state of ill health. Unquestionably, this is purely a form of lurid and exploitative entertainment - it’s appallingly cruel.

Shelley Duvall was a movie star ... whatever dignity a mere unfortunate creature might have in this world, is denied her by your displaying her in this way.

I recoil in complete disgust. I hope others will join me in boycotting your utterly heartless form of entertainment, because it has nothing to do with compassionate healing.

Sincerely disgusted,

Vivian Kubrick.

One of the very earliest celebrity figures in my awareness thanks to Faerie Tale Theatre, and then a fairly constant one once my early dabblings in film-geekdom centred around Altman and Kubrick. This is very sad, and I wish her all the best.

Is there any more developments with this?

it sounds like it carried on being depressing:

The same day the episode aired on Nov. 18th Vivian Kubrick launched a GoFundMe campaign for Shelley Duvall attempting to raise $100,000, but fans immediately began questioning her motivation. Why would Vivian Kubrick, a known Scientologist who severed ties with her family seventeen years ago, raise money for psychiatric and mental-health treatment when her religion strictly forbids it? As hundreds of donations began coming in, more and more fans began raising questions. The GoFundMe campaign’s location was listed as Clearwater, FL, which happens to be the headquarters of the Church of Scientology. Over the next several days Vivian began actively policing the GoFundMe page, blocking any user who asked questions about where their contributions were going or the specifics of what kind of treatment Shelley would be receiving. Actress Candy Clark (American Graffiti, The Man Who Fell to Earth) posted to her official Facebook page on Nov. 19th urging people not to donate. “Bogus ‘help Shelley Duvall’ page started by estranged daughter of the late Stanley Kubrick. Any time questions are brought up as to where the money will go, by me and others, our comments are promptly deleted. Money will probably not go to help Shelley. I have put in a complaint to the go-fund me site.”

Three days later, Vivian pulled the plug on the GoFundMe campaign and provided the following explanation on Twitter: “Shelley Duvall’s family are unable to accept large donations for the present,” elaborating that outside donations would affect her SAG-AFTRA and government benefits. The Hollywood Reporter immediately followed up on Kubrick’s explanation, reaching out to several Hollywood labor experts who all agreed that Shelley’s SAG-AFTRA benefits would be completely unaffected by the GoFundMe campaign. Nevertheless, over 660 donations (including a $500 donation from actress Jennifer Tilly) were refunded, and later that very same day Vivian Kubrick posted: “I’m taking a nice break from Twitter for the next few months.” Then, the controversial episode suddenly disappeared from Dr. Phil’s online episode guide without a trace. Weird. The Actors Fund of America, a charitable organization that helps performers in the entertainment industry is currently working to provide financial aid to Shelley Duvall and any other help she might need.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_sad_and_heartbreaking_reality_of_shelley_duvalls_mental_health

BIG new feature here

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/searching-for-shelley-duvall-the-reclusive-icon-on-fleeing-hollywood-and-the-scars-of-making-the-shining

Holy cow, she looks so much like a friend of mine now it's uncanny. Looking forward to reading this, thanks Ned.

Thank god she didn't die. I just wanted to say I think her performance as Olive Oyl is the greatest performance in the history of cinema

titan

I didn't love her as an actress--she's touching in The Shining, even if you don't know about her ordeal--but I'll read that for sure. I find her fascinating--like Karen Black, like Susan Anspach, like a few others--as representative of a '70s conception of beauty.

Shes amazing in 3 women

she had one of those screen presences where you see her in movies and shes so open and natural and odd, and you assume shes just *like* that. and obviously she is to a certain extent, but shes also got so much charisma that you dont always realize shes also doing a performance and making choices, which i think leads to some of her performances being underrated.

OTM. Obviously there's a lot of her idiosyncratic self up there on the screen but, for instance, Wendy Torrance is very much not Millie Lammoreaux.

From that profile, it seems she's managing passably?
I'd pick Thieves Like Us as her best performance; you have to be thinking really hard to portray such an unreflective character and bring them out to the viewers.

Relieved she’s alive, one of my favorite actresses ever.

Add another vote for 3 Women.

Yeah that profile made me feel good. Sounds like she's doing OK under the circumstances. Protection and affection of her neighbors is moving.

REALLY glad that the Dr. Phil interview, as Seth Abramovitch wrote, won't be the last piece of media with Ms. Duvall when she is still alive.

pic.twitter.com/PFWfPHlKZV

— SNL Hosts Introducing the Musical Guest (@snlhostsintro) July 7, 2022

she had one of those screen presences where you see her in movies and shes so open and natural and odd, and you assume shes just *like* that. and obviously she is to a certain extent, but shes also got so much charisma that you dont always realize shes also doing a performance and making choices, which i think leads to some of her performances being underrated.

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Thursday, February 11, 2021

really good post

RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chqSzA_wBIw

Love her. Rewatching 3 Women tonight. What an actor!! Rest easy Shelley Duvall

Seriously, 3 women. She had the type of presence that could burrow in your brain as an archetype and start appearing in your dreams

I just found out an acquaintance of mine was involved in making her penultimate film (Manna From Heaven)

I'd never even heard of Bernice Bobs Her Hair until today.

xp ha, I was an extra in Manna From Heaven. Only did it for the possible chance to meet or see Shelley (no luck)

Good to see 3 women number one. Like nobody else ever on screen.

Just been reading about how Kubrick was an abusive arsehole again

didn't know Roy Montgomery was such a Duvall stan, but his recent Insta posts are very nice

Author of that excellent Hollywood Reporter piece with a brief farewell

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/shelley-duvall-dead-remembered-seth-abramovitch-1235946258/

"One time, Gucci reached out wanting her to sign off on her likeness in a Stanley Kubrick-inspired ad campaign, which she did."

Blimey:
https://www.gucci.com/us/en/st/stories/article/exquisite-gucci-campaign

That can't have been cheap. I admire whichever employee of Gucci had to sell the idea of a series of Stanley Kubrick-inspired fashion shoots to the estate of Stanley Kubrick, and also clear it with whichever entity owns Warner Brothers nowadays. And they could have half-assed it, but unless there's AI trickery involved they seem to have made some spot-on recreations of the original props.

It's not often I visit Gucci's website. Every fibre of my being wants to say "how can a handbag cost £2820" albeit that it is a nice bag.

For the record Gucci's Shelley Duvall is not quite the actual Shelley Duvall:
https://graziamagazine.com/me/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2022/08/gucci2.jpg

Not a sentence I thought I would ever write.

Musing on an alternate timeline where Altman found her a little earlier and she was in M*A*S*H instead of Sally Kellerman

Great thread, thanks.
think she might have seemed a bit young and fresh for Hot Lips and the movie overall? But maybe not---btw, doctors were being drafted into the Korean "police action," as US Gov was calling it, while moving fast and somewhat desperately, so that's why you have 30-something hipsters w reg army, not that the latter doctors couldn't have a lot of the same attitude in and vs. wartime's bad craziness.
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a trip, faithful to Scott Fitzgerald's eeltext, and was in PBS's American Short Story series (was thinking Anjelica Huston's "A Rose For Emily" was in here too; My Mom always showed it to her AM Lit classes):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Short_Story

text, not eeltext

The book (and original script) version of Hot Lips was an attractive 40-something authoritarian lifer who exits the narrative immediately after the shower incident. Her age was adjusted when Kellerman was cast, and this was carried over to the TV show.

Regardless of age, I don't think Duvall could have embodied the martinet qualities of the character.

But I was thinking about this issue beforehand - how well Altman cast the movies of his prime period. It's hard for me to think of a major role where the actor could have been replaced with another member of his "repertory" to any great benefit. Maybe the men in Images are the only obvious example. It even worked to the extent of knowing when not to have an actor appear - how distracting would Duvall have been in a cameo in The Long Goodbye or Quintet, for example?

I could have used a distraction during quintet

Why didn't her version of Even Cowsgirls Get The Blues? From Entertainment Weekly's chronology:

August 1980: Warner Bros. signs Shelley Duvall (Popeye) to write and star in Cowgirls, which she describes two years later as ”my Cuckoo’s Nest.”

K.D. Lang's soundtrack album was a late '90s CD cut-out bin staple too.

I finally watched Gus's version a couple years ago after intending to get to it for almost thirty years. Even in the weird 90s, I can't imagine anyone ever thought that would work for a broad audience.

Yeah, I saw the first chunk of it as a weekend afternoon movie in syndication maybe 20 years ago and--while thinking it looked good visually--wondered how fast whoever greenlit it got fired.

As for the Duvall version, I imagine it fell victim to simply being an oddball star vehicle in the early '80s. Altman himself had several studio projects get cancelled in the wake of Popeye--which was a hit, albeit not as big a one as Paramount wanted--and her flick probably got hit with the same axes. Moving over to TV production was really the smartest move she could have made at that point, neatly side-stepping the '70s fallout in Reagan's Hollywood.

Speaking of Popeye, not sure how much of this is BS or 'printing the legend', but I've always loved the story about Altman signed onto the film with the stipulation that Duvall be cast as Olive Oyl, much to the chagrin of Paramount, who'd been cozying up to Lorne Michaels as a bridge to getting SNL cast members into the studio, and they were set on Gilda Radner getting the role. It's sad too, because she may have been merely alright in the role, but it could have led to a better film career than the one she ended up having.

Popeye is probably the highest-profile big film from that period that I've never seen - I don't recall it ever being on television when I was a kid, and even by the mid-1980s it seems to have been scrubbed from the collective consciousness, written off as a huge flop. It never had a reappraisal when Robin Williams finally took off as a film star in the late 1980s and the Popeye franchise itself has remained totally dead ever since. I don't think there has ever been an attempt to reboot him. Beyond e.g. the ZX Spectrum game.

Is the film any good? From what I've seen it has an oddly distanced filming style, as if the characters were tiny ants. For some reason the few clips I have seen put me in mind of Time Bandits, in that they look strangely grimy for a happy family film.

Popeye made its money back iirc

I absolutely loved it as a kid and continue to love it as an adult as a consequence. It’s so weird, the songs are so good, and overall I feel it’s a big tearjerker for saps like me. I had the soundtrack record when I was 5 or so and listened to it many zillions of times. So it never disappeared for me.

Yeah it was successful but not the blockbuster it was expected to be.

XPS More than that! According to Wiki it grossed almost $50 million worldwide against a (bloated) budget of $20 million, but Altman later said that Paramount viewed it as a comic book movie, and at the time that meant stuff like Star Wars and the first Superman film, so when it didn't deliver like those films, it became regarded as a failure.

It also was released at roughly the same time as the original cut of Heaven's Gate, so if there was a mere whiff of blood in the water...

Popeye is probably the highest-profile big film from that period that I've never seen - I don't recall it ever being on television when I was a kid

Apparently it wasn't shown on British tv until 1993.

Altman himself was in a particularly tough position at the time too: he was coming off a string of flops at Fox, the last of which, an all-star comedy called H.E.A.L.T.H., didn't actually receive a proper commercial release from the studio (Altman & the producers paid out of pocket to strike some prints they toured themselves at colleges and rep houses as part of "A Night With Robert Altman" show. Fox later dumped it on cable).

I developed my love for it from random lazy sunday afternoon showings on US cable in the early 90s.

Time Bandits is a good comparison re:griminess, but the film I think about most in relation to it is Playtime, its almost like the grimy stoner American version of that for me: a comedy that’s as concerned with things like architecture, how people are arranged in the frame, musical underscore, etc as it is with coherent recognizable "jokes" (although its got plenty of those too)

The song he sings to Sweetpea?? Tender af. His salty old dad? Kinda scary but relatable. And of course the classsic Ned posted above, “He Needs Me” — and all at once I knew, I knew at once, I knew he needed meeeeeee….truly i love it all. Even the Yam What I Yam song. Oh and the Sweethaven anthem?? Gtfo.

I’m Mean?? I’ve thought about that song many zillions of times over the years.

He's tall
Good looking
And he's large
He's large
Large

Larrrrrrrge

The combination of 3-D and 2-D elements seemed unique, and maybe still would be: am I remembering right, that Popeye Robin and his biceps would come rolling out of a plywood door that had a cartoon plywood door pasted onto it? Anyway, the sets, on a real(?)-looking island omg--and I think Robin even got to improvise a little, as he was inclined to do elsewhere, and Altman was said to encourage in other films---like somebody held a baby up to Popeye, who started to speak, and the baby said, "bay-bee?"and Popeye is like "yeah that's what I said you're a baby," kinda muttering, as Popeye did in the cartoons sometimes (btw, in spirit, though not literally, this film matches the Fleischer brothers' brilliant animation; along w Popeye they did right by Betty Boop and others)(omg if this had been a big enough hit, maybe Altman and Duvall would have Betty Booped us!)
The all-ages audience I saw it in was totally on board, also improvising, talking back to the screen etc. The next day I bought the soundtrack, about which xgau said:

Popeye [Boardwalk, 1980]
The orchestrations are Kurt Weill meeting Lionel Newman at the Firesign Theatre, and the actor-vocals are as overheard as a Robert Altman soundtrack. Composer Harry Nilsson hasn't worked this hard since Schmilsson; arranger Van Dyke Parks hasn't worked this wisely since Song Cycle. So although nothing will appease my hunger for the glorious and inexplicably omitted "Everything Is Food," which I trust Neil Bogart will release as the B side of a disco disc, this beats Xanadu, Flash Gordon, and Urban Cowboy combined--as a movie, and as a piece of vinyl. A-

(Speaking of sountracks. k. d. lang's was the only part of Van Sant's movie that I've seen approved by film reviewers, and it did better commercially than the flick----quite an enjoyable xpost bargain bin find, at least for us langheads.

the sets, on a real(?)-looking island omg

Real, functional sets on a real island in Malta!

<Tons> of cocaine behind the scenes.

Robert Evans (with Jules Feiffer and Robert Altman) on the set of POPEYE. Who else would have green-lit it? #RIP pic.twitter.com/Ht2IpwuQlJ

— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) October 28, 2019

Robert Evans had a street value of $10 mil.

Xps
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popeye_Village

I so want to go, thanks!!

Don't be a lemming polka is my favourite reclines era Lang song

"Apparently it wasn't shown on British tv until 1993."

You learn something every day. A bit of digging reveals it was first shown on 02 May 1993 at 9pm, as part of a series of Robin Williams films (Robin Williams: Acting Funny) that also had Good Morning Vietnam, Seize the Day, and Moscow on the Hudson. So perhaps the series should have been called Robin Williams: Acting.

Skimming through Channel 4's annual report for 1993(PDF) I'm reminded that 1993 was also the year of Tony Parsons' programme about A Clockwork Orange that had about 25% of the film in it, and also New Nightmares, a series about science fiction that I actually remember watching:
https://vhistory.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/new-nightmares-tape-1510/

And also Lipstick on your Collar, starring a young Ewan McGregor. And Louise Germaine, who dropped off the face of the Earth afterwards.

Looking at clips of Popeye on Youtube it strikes me that Robert Altman seems to have wanted to get the sets into shot, or he wanted to stage it like a theatrical revue, because there are loads of long shots of people off in the distance as if the audience was watching a stage play, viz the final sequences here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ncFDuKdgNE

Altman's big thing was overlapping dialogue, and he had great taste in cinematographers, and I suppose he was good with a roving camera, but instinctively Popeye looks and feels like a 1970s film, an early 1970s film, which was a bad idea in 1980 because tastes had changed.

Shelley Duvall's physical and facial acting is amazing in that film. It's often said that a great actor can read out a phone book and make it interesting - Shelley Duvall could have had the same effect just by silently reading the book to herself. I picture her slowly flicking through the pages while her eyes dart about, occasionally widening in surprise.

Apparently it wasn't shown on British tv until 1993.

― Kim Kimberly, Monday, July 15, 2024 8:33 PM (six days ago)

That's maybe when my family taped it and I watched it tons