How Shelley Duvall Left A Two-Decade Retirement And Made Her Final Film Appearance

Felissa Rose is America’s modern day “scream queen”; at 55, the veteran of 150 movies, most of them horror. But she was, she says, genuinely frightened knocking on the front door of the Texas home owned by Shelley Duvall. It was December 2022, and Duvall, star of one of the most acclaimed horror films of all time – Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – had not made a film for 20 years. Today, she would break the drought.

“The first thing I said was, ‘I’m so nervous and excited,’” says Rose. “‘I just love you, and may I have a hug?’ Shelley looked at me with these big, sparkly eyes, and said: ‘Of course!’ and embraced me. That’s when I started crying. She was so sweet, it was the most lovely scenario I could ever imagine.”

The film, The Forest Hills, will finally be released next week, in a handful of US cinemas and digitally in the rest of the world. Duvall died three months ago from complications related to diabetes, and this was her final role. Directed by Scott Goldberg, the independent production stars the relatively unknown actor Chiko Mendez as Rico, a man who endures head trauma in the Catskill mountains and begins to experience “nightmare visions” of his mother (played by Duvall). Other stars include Edward Furlong and Dee Wallace, another scream queen, in a cameo role.

Duvall’s participation was a surprise to everyone. As well as being officially retired since 2002, she was using a wheelchair, couldn’t travel and struggled to remember lines. But such was her keenness that what was originally a cameo role (inspired by Jason Voorhees’ hallucinations of his mother, Pamela, in Friday the 13th) was significantly expanded and Goldberg, the actors and crew returned to Duvall’s home to continue filming.

“I’d always admired Shelley and longed to work with her,” says Goldberg. “Her performance in The Shining is one of the greatest in cinema history.”

When casting the film, Goldberg approached Duvall’s longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, the former singer of Breakfast Club. “I didn’t hold out much hope. He passed along her number, we spoke and she said she’d be interested. It was as simple as that.”

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949, Duvall grew up a few hours south in Houston, where her father was a lawyer and her mother worked in real estate. She made her name in a series of landmark 1970s classics, including seven films with director Robert Altman, who discovered her while she was still in college. Duvall made her debut in Brewster McCloud as a teenage tour guide, before starring as a mail-order bride in McCabe & Mrs Miller in 1971. Other collaborations between her and Altman included Thieves Like Us, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, and 3 Women, for which she won best actress at Cannes in 1977.

Later, she starred in Annie Hall as the reporter who describes sex with Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer as “a Kafkaesque experience” and in Popeye opposite Robin Williams.

But she remains best known for her role as the wife of Jack Nicholson’s murderous author in 1980’s The Shining. The single poster image, featuring Duvall cowering in a corner holding a knife, her eyes and mouth wide open, as a grinning Nicholson crashes through the door with an axe, captures one of cinema’s most memorable moments.

“It terrified me,” Rose says. “I loved her face on screen. She was so captivating and riveting in that film.”

Yet The Shining is often cited as one of the reasons Duvall retreated from acting. It had a notoriously gruelling 13-month shoot, with one scene reportedly running to 127 takes. Duvall once recalled that Kubrick had her “crying 12 hours a day for weeks on end”.

She returned to acting only sporadically through the 1990s – after a successful stint as a children’s TV producer – and returned from Los Angeles to Texas, where she remained for the next two decades. In that time, she made only one public appearance, on a widely condemned episode of US talkshow Dr Phil in 2016, where she openly discussed her struggles with mental illness. “I am very sick. I need help,” she said as she disclosed paranoid fantasies about the late Robin Williams being “a shapeshifter”.

But Goldberg says Duvall’s cognisance and commitment was evident throughout the filming of The Forest Hills. “Playing Mama, the matriarch who goads our antihero, was a challenge for her as she’d not previously taken on such a menacing character [Duvall was best known for playing victims]. She really dug deep and turned in a powerful, nuanced performance that’s unlike anything I’ve seen her do before.

“Mentally, she was in good shape: sharp as a tack and highly engaged with the filming process. Communication and conversation were easy, she was sweet and kind and upbeat. She even spoke about what a great time she’d had making The Shining! We kept in touch after the shoot – touching base on the progress of the movie, or talking about the weather, or sometimes she’d just call to ask when I’d be back to see her.”

It is unclear exactly what motivated Duvall to return to acting for this role – Goldberg’s passion for her work and his offer to shoot at her house will probably have been motivating factors. But it’s also possible the film’s themes, including schizophrenia, touched a nerve following her appearance on Dr Phil.

According to Mendez, Duvall seemed incredibly excited to be working again. “Her face and smile just read ‘happy’,” he says. “One of my mottoes has always been to ‘surrender to the camera’ and Shelley nurtured that. We talked about every scene in detail, she made suggestions. I witnessed her plough through long hours and still stay on point. She kept me on my toes. We both loved every second of it.”

Mendez says he imagined “having to go through a gauntlet of security” to meet the actor. “But it was quite the opposite. My experience when I first got there was greeting a lot of cows and a smelling the pure country air. As we approached the house, Shelley was sitting in her pickup truck in the driveway smoking her cigarette. She welcomed all of us with a huge smile, was very friendly and most of all, humble. We almost immediately shared memories of living in the countryside.”

He says while Duvall “felt uneasy at times with discomfort and pains”, they talked about method acting “and worked them into our scenes to make the mother and son scenario more authentic”. They also discussed everythingfrom Altman’s passion for dolly shots to advances in film-making technology. “Shelley was in awe of how far it has come. After being told the director was in New York, she was surprised to see him pop up on a mobile phone to direct her from afar. She was so amazed as to how easy it has become to film a movie these days. With almost with a kid-like demeanour she uttered: ‘Boy, how things have changed!’”

Goldberg also recalls Duvall’s “genuine interest” in the speed and efficiency of digital work. “I remember her playful critique of the final poster for the film: she said the drawing of her character made it look as if she had a milk moustache.”

Rose’s time with Duvall made a lasting impression. “I felt like we were old friends – that was her gift.” The actor was “thrilled” about her comeback, Rose reports, and never seemed unwell. “She seemed very happy where she was. She no longer wanted that Hollywood life. She and her husband showed me around a few nests with animals. She was surrounded by love.”

Duvall didn’t get an opportunity to promote her new film. But in a February 2023 interview with People magazine, she described her comeback as “so much fun” and joked that “Jessica Tandy won an Oscar when she was 80. I can still win.”

Goldberg says the actor’s enthusiasm extended to future projects and he had been keeping her up to date with any offers. “For me personally, a significant motivator was to try to make sure that her legacy was not overshadowed by her exploitative portrayal on Dr Phil. She deeply regretted her participation in the programme.”

Duvall, he added, “deserved better, and the fan support we witnessed in anticipation of her return to the screen was cheering. We wanted to offer her an opportunity to go out with dignity and I think the film serves as testament to her continued brilliance. It’s a tragedy she didn’t have more chance to show it.”