What made her so captivating then (the film critic Pauline Kael called her the “female Buster Keaton”) still exists: a raw honesty, an intuitive quality and a winsome Texas drawl.
“I remember, on ‘Saturday Night Live,’” Mr. Gilroy said, “they did a joke in which they were in some kind of room and you could hear the neighbors right through the wall, and one of the lines was, “These walls are thinner than Shelley Duvall!”
Her disappearance wasn’t, as it had been rumored, born of a protracted breakdown caused years before by her treatment on the set of “The Shining.” In fact, she continues to have only good things to say about that intense yearlong shoot in London and her admiration for Mr. Kubrick. Instead, the pause may be more accurately, though not definitively, attributed to the emotional impact of two events: the 1994 Northridge earthquake, which damaged her Los Angeles home, and the stressful toll of one of her brothers falling ill, which prompted her return to her native Texas three decades ago.
It could also equally be attributed to the curse of fame: It isn’t enough to be famous; one must continuously stoke the fire. Leave it for too long, especially if you begin to “age out” as a woman in the industry, and a career will wane.
In 1982, two years after “The Shining” made her a household name, Ms. Duvall started her own production company, Platypus (and, later, another called Think Entertainment), creating television shows for children, most notably “Faerie Tale Theatre.” Each episode boasted an all-star cast: Robin Williams, Christopher Reeves, Carol Kane, Bud Cort, Bernadette Peters, and Mick Jagger, among them. The overall effect was one of baroque fun, or as Time magazine proclaimed, it offered “a hip, witty twist to storybook classics.”
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