Shelley Duvall never played the victim, even when she played the victim

Actress Shelley Duvall in a scene from the 1977 movie 3 Women. (Photo / Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection / Getty Images)

Almost nothing said about Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance in The Shining is the truth. The lies start as soon as she enters the Overlook Hotel and the cook, Dick (Scatman Crothers), calls her son Danny (Danny Lloyd) by his nickname, “Doc”. Dick fibs that Wendy must have said it aloud. She hasn’t, and in the next scene, Dick tells the boy privately that they’re both psychic. But no one ever clues in Wendy - she just absorbs more lies - and by the end of the movie, she’s endured a literal and metaphorical snow job.

The worst offender is, of course, her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson). Smarmily deferential to his employers, the alcoholic novelist is cruel to his wife - “the old sperm bank”, he sneers - even before he starts dreaming of chopping her and Danny into pieces. At the Overlook Hotel, he’s the salaried caretaker, but she’s the one doing the work: trying to repair the phone lines, tinkering with the boiler, contacting the forest rangers, drafting the family’s emergency escape plans. In return, Jack blames her for his writer’s block and, using his most fiendishly rational voice, tries to convince her that their bruised and traumatised son must have strangled himself.

Actually, it was a ghost. But to Wendy, The Shining is barely a ghost story at all - she doesn’t even see one until the last 10 minutes of the film. Duvall, who died this week at 75 from diabetes complications, claimed she never even glimpsed the film’s infamous identical twins until she screened a final cut.

Stanley Kubrick, the 1980 film’s director, didn’t believe in ghosts. He was into familial torture. (One of his preproduction touchstones was David Lynch’s Eraserhead.) To the pique of original novelist Stephen King, Kubrick shifted Wendy’s character from a sunny blonde to a damaged brunette and for the psychotic husband, cast the actor who’d won an Oscar playing a mental patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Grumbled King, “the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene.”

King fought to preserve The Shining as a horror story (Family Sees Ghouls!) while Kubrick’s version skews closer to tragedy (Browbeaten Housewife Refuses to See Her Husband Is the Ghoul!) Duvall’s Wendy is suffering a real-world nightmare: what happens when your spouse sobers up and he’s still a violent jerk? As recently as 2021, Duvall would tear up watching the scene where Wendy wards off Jack with a baseball bat: “I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.

And that’s merely what’s on-screen. Duvall was double-crossed again by the stories behind the film’s production. I’m not just referencing Kubrick’s antics: his well-documented mental and emotional bullying during the 13-month production, a reported 127 takes of the baseball bat scene, the documentary footage (from 1980′s Making the Shining) of Duvall sprawled on the floor attempting to quell an anxiety attack. I’m thinking about how fans of Duvall (and hers were generational, as her weird-girl energy made her a TikTok sensation decades after she left Hollywood) interpreted these facts to mean that Duvall herself was hardly acting, that what we’re seeing in the film is an abused woman, not an actress - a pitiable figure little different than a dancing chicken on a hot metal plate.

This victimisation narrative seems to be a well-intentioned way to champion Duvall while countering the harsh reviews her performance received upon the film’s release. (Variety called her “a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric”.) Her turn as Wendy was nominated for a 1981 Razzie award for worst actress. The organisation voided her nomination in 2022, writing that “Duvall’s performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of her”. I’m no fan of Kubrick’s tactics - to me, if a film-maker makes an actor do something 127 times, that’s a failure of their own direction - so I’ll simply note that Kubrick’s own Razzie nomination for The Shining still stands (equally undeserved).

Much of our impressions of The Shining set come from that 1980 documentary short, directed by Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s then-17-year-old daughter. It’s online, and if you want to witness Kubrick the tyrant, he’s in there reacting sarcastically when Duvall shows him that her hair is falling out and ordering his crew to show her no sympathy. In one tense confrontation, he bawls her out for missing a cue.

Look closer, however, and you’ll see that Duvall refuses to cower. She insists that he - not her - bungled that take by prematurely calling cut, and rolls her eyes at his petty chest-thumping. When she questions the timing of a line, Kubrick at first tries to steamroll her and then, in a sign of fragility, changes the boundary lines of their argument (“I honestly don’t think the lines are going to make an awful lot of difference if you get the right attitude”) before suggesting they take their conversation somewhere else, as though self-conscious of being disagreed with on camera.

“He pushed me and it hurt and I resented him for it,” Duvall says at the end of the documentary. Nevertheless, she adds, “I really respect him and really like him, both as a person and as a director. I’m amazed. He’s taught me more than I’ve learned in all the other pictures I’ve done.” She knew who he was and what they’d made. She even knew (and loathed and accepted) Kubrick’s use of an unflattering 18mm lens for the sole purpose of distorting her face to look squished and alien.

Then, and up until she died, Duvall insisted that The Shining was an artistic collaboration, that together, she and Kubrick had forged a unique heroine - a battered-wife character deemed repellent because Duvall channelled fear so profoundly that she was painful to watch. When awful things happen, Kubrick’s screenplay simply reads, “Wendy reacts”. That gulping goldfish terror sprang from Duvall.

“When the film was finished, I told Stanley I’d probably never cry again,” Duvall told the Los Angeles Times before The Shining’s release. “But four days later, when it came time for me to leave, I was weeping all over the place. It had been such an intimate experience working with him. There was such love there.”

Over the years, Duvall’s descriptions of working with Kubrick never changed. She always praised their results - and she always said she wouldn’t do it again. Still, the myth persists that Kubrick triggered Duvall’s mental health issues that became apparent after she retired to Texas, and that he was perhaps the reason she’d quit acting. Never mind that Duvall said with amusement that The Shining and her subsequent levelling-up in star status “really has only affected me in the way that it takes longer to go grocery shopping”. Our images of Wendy’s harrowing ordeal have merged with our images of Duvall herself, much like how Dick describes the psychic residue of the Overlook Hotel: “When something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind, say like if someone burns toast.”

Duvall maintained her truth. So what’s it going to take to believe her?

Let’s look again at Duvall’s “simpering hysteric” - or as King called her, “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid.” Once she accepts that her husband is dangerous, she clobbers him unconscious in two blows, drags his body to the pantry, resists his manipulations to let him out, saves her son by pushing him out the window, stands her ground with a knife, and finally executes the escape plan she’d already hatched, driving to safety in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, on a snowcat.

Duvall does not break. The hotel does not win. Ironically, a woman-hating ghost (played by Philip Stone) is the only character who accurately describes the woman we’re watching. “Your wife appears to be stronger than we imagined, Mr Torrance,” he says.

Yes, she was.