By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: the late Shelley Duvall, a screen presence without equal who challenged TV conventions in the 1980s with Faerie Tale Theatre.
The American film industry is filled with – and has always been defined by – highly individualistic talents. Free thinkers, those with powerful and unconventional creative visions, rebels reshaping the cinematic form, performers whose very personas have prompted cinematic movements…all have been essential to the growth and development of American cinema. Few talents, however, are as singular as those of the late Shelley Duvall, who sadly passed away recently at the age of 75 due to complications arising from diabetes. While many actresses are described as incomparable or iconic, Shelley Duvall truly had no equal…nobody looked, sounded or acted even remotely like Shelley Duvall. She was a true original who was literally the auteur of her own on-screen image, crafting a cinematic body of work that is near sui generis. And as a TV producer, Shelley Duvall was a truly pioneering, largely unsung, and virtually forgotten figure.
Shelley Alexis Duvall was born in 1949 in Fort Worth, Texas, the first child of Bobbie Ruth Crawford, a real estate broker, and Robert Richardson “Bobby” Duvall, a cattle auctioneer-turned-lawyer. An energetic, artistic child, Shelley Duvall initially had no aspirations to becoming an actress, but instead had her eye on a career in science. Sometime in 1970, however, Duvall was truly in the right place at the right time. The tall, gangly, bizarrely beautiful 21-year-old met burgeoning director Robert Altman (who had directed M*A*S*H, Countdown and That Cold Day In The Park) at a party in Houston while he was shooting Brewster McCloud (1970) on location. The director and several of his creative collaborators were rightly fascinated with Duvall’s unusual energy and physical appearance, and ended up drawing her into the off-the-wall project, with the debut actress playing love interest to leading man Bud Cort, who plays a young man obsessed with flying. “I got tired of arguing, and thought maybe I am an actress,” Duvall has said of her unusual entrée into acting. “They told me to come. I simply got on a plane and did it. I was swept away.” Duvall’s trip to Hollywood to work on Brewster McCloud was her first outside of Texas, and it marked the beginning of an essential relationship with one of the master directors of the American cinema.

Robert Altman utilised Shelley Duvall to stunning effect in some of his finest films, with the actress lighting up the screen in modern classics like McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), 3 Women (1977), and Popeye (1980), in which the actress gave extraordinary physical form to the beloved cartoon character Olive Oyl. While Altman drew career-best work out of actors like Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Keith Carradine and many others, no actor better embodied the director’s wonderfully free-wheeling, idiosyncratic, unconventional, and of-his-era brand of creative rebellion better than Shelley Duvall, whose bizarre brand of energy was wholly in sync with that of her bravura director. Their combined work on the utterly mesmeric 3 Women (along with the equally brilliant and wholly singular work of co-star Sissy Spacek) is one of the best examples of director-actor creative synergy you’ll ever see. “Bob is like family,” Duvall once said. “I trust him almost implicitly. He would never do anything to hurt me. Bob won my trust right at the beginning. He encouraged me to be myself, to never take acting lessons or to take myself too seriously.”
No other director would harness Shelley Duvall’s energy as effectively as Robert Altman did, but the actress gave many superb performances, always delivered with her trademark unpredictability, wit and energy. Duvall notably and unforgettably distilled pure terror and confusion in Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining (1980), and showcased her comedic skills in Suburban Commando (1991), while her cult cache was acknowledged by the likes of Jane Campion (1996’s The Portrait Of A Lady), Steven Soderbergh (1995’s The Underneath) and Scott Goldberg (2023’s The Forest Hills), who tapped the actress for small roles.

“Well, I do not want to be recognised as Shelley Duvall,” the actress said in the late 1970s. “I want people to be aware of each of the different characters I play.” Despite often looking completely different from role to role, with a succession of wigs and eye-catching wardrobe items, Duvall could never truly hide or suppress her extraordinary physicality. She created an odd corner of the American cinematic landscape that was very much her own, and which no others could really trespass on. In the same way that the loose, iconoclastic 1970s saw the rise of unconventional male stars like Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino et al, so Shelley Duvall was their stand-alone female equal.
Outside of the near-auteur-like creation of her own cinematic acting idiom, Shelley Duvall also became something of a more traditional auteur in the 1980s, though her medium this time would be television. While the flipping and tampering with classic tales and cultural mores is pretty much standard fare these days, Shelley Duvall proved herself something of a revisionist firestarter with her now barely remembered essentially-for-children TV series Faerie Tale Theatre, which the actress created, produced, presented, and occasionally appeared in. Decades before & Juliet or even Barbie, Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre took classic fairy tales and retold them through a very modern, and often very feminist, lense.

While vastly entertaining, inventively crafted (Duvall snagged major talents like Francis Ford Coppola, Tim Burton, Ivan Passer, Nicholas Meyer, Eric Idle, Roger Vadim and fellow Unsung Auteurs Lamont Johnson, Tony Bill, Graeme Clifford, and Michael Lindsay-Hogg to direct episodes), incredibly starry (the cast list is a literal who’s who, with the likes of Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Susan Sarandon, Mick Jagger, James Coburn, Christopher Reeve, Klaus Kinski, Billy Crystal, Jeff Goldblum, Helen Mirren, Brian Dennehy, Frank fucking Zappa, and many, many, many more also featuring) and beautifully tailored, the importance of Faerie Tale Theatre for its narrative daring and influence cannot be overstated. It was all Shelley Duvall’s ingenious doing, proving that the actress’s off-screen originality and singularity were just as pronounced as her on-screen image.
After the groundbreaking success of Faerie Tale Theatre, Duvall created something of a cottage industry out of anthology television, applying the same kind of revisionist bravura to the American folk tale with Tall Tales & Legends and storied horror with Nightmare Classics. Duvall also became a major player in the world of children’s television, producing the TV series Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories (another ground-breaker, in which famous actors narrate classic animated tales) and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and the telemovies Frog (1988), Backfield In Motion (1991), and Mother Goose Rock’n’Rhyme (1990), in which she also starred. Savvy, smart, knowing kids’ television is now everywhere, and it all owes at least a partial debt to Shelley Duvall.

“I might get killed, but I wouldn’t die,” Shelley Duvall once said. “I’d be born again as another me – or a lampshade – but I’ll be on earth…always. I believe in everything and everybody existing forever and on and on in the same or other forms.” If anyone could make this happen, it’s Shelley Duvall…a true original.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.