Shelley Duvall : Stardust and Invitation

She was very easy to let into your home, that is the first thing I would say about Shelley Duvall. Waifish, tall, spindly, with a voice that perpetually shivered in a broken falsetto, and two perfect camera apertures in the middle of her face - she carried with her the presence of something eternal, and yet fragile enough that if you were to touch her she might disappear into the fog of your awakened mind. To a young child like me very few things were safer, more magical, more inviting. On-screen Duvall didn't come to me through her considerable body of work in the seventies for directorial institutions like Robert Altman, Woody Allen, or Stanley Kubrick, but by way of an anthology TV series for children called simply; “Faerie Tale Theater”. When we didn't have cable we rented the collection from the library, and we watched religiously as Shelley delivered us kids our version of the Twilight Zone via the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, or Charles Perrault. Shelley didn't just seem a host to me, she seemed like she herself possessed the magic of these worlds in her lithe features, most especially in those perfectly round large spheres that somehow seated themselves so symmetrically in her face. Week after week she introduced a new brilliantly acted take on our favorite fairytales with the warmth of a fresh baked pie on window sill. Setting us up to cross into a new dimension where these tales felt as mystical, extraordinary, and funny as they did on page. To this day it is one of my most favored and cherished memories in my childhood, and she is as synonymous, as connected to spirit of that show as Rod Serling was to the Twilight Zone. Much like Serling what made Duvall so appealing to me was that she gave promise to the idea that our best selves lied not and what we could already see, but what was behind that, and what our imaginations could conjure. As an actor she was as singular as her “Nashville” co-star Jeff Goldblum, or Linda Hunt, or Harry Dean Stanton, but she was also a much larger, bigger, than them -a genuine movie star with the strongest sensibilities of an character actor. That character was loving, curious, child-like, and grown. There was no actor before or after her that embodied the dream, the fantasy, the fable, quite like she did. She was an actor that provoked the imagination by simply existing.

Though Faerie Tale Theater was my introduction to Duvall, it was not where I finished. Cable TV would soon introduce me to her roles in Robert Altman's oddity “Popeye” and then to her role in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining”. Though both were a lot more grown up material than Faerie Tale, her very magical, mystical, and ethereal quality remained. She was the perfect gateway between Robin Williams’s animated chaos, and Altman's demure humanity. If you needed a ferryman to get you from one sensibility to the other you could do no better than Duvall. What Roger Ebert accurately pinpointed as a “dignity” is directly in alignment with Altman’s stylings. It keeps the otherworldliness of what lived on the pages of comic strips and served it empathy, flesh, and something rooted in the earth of our imagination. Every neck turn, every confident inflection of an out of tune tune in “He needs me”, every incongruous movement lent further credit to the possibility that these places were real, that “Popeye” and “Bluto” were real men, that “Sweethaven” was a real place. Her abilities were such that ink became 3-dimensional skin and bone right before your eyes.

In Stanley Kubrick’s seminal take on Stephen King's horror classic “The Shining” his vision redressed much of what was in King’s text. Kubrick aimed for something much more subversive and elliptical, rather than the plainly paranormal. The supernatural may exist in Kubrick’s version, but so too is the very real frights of abuse and colonization. As “Wendy Torrance” Duvall masterfully carried both as realities in her petrified melancholia and stressed out cigarettes. Duvall; one of my favorite cigarette actors of her generation,(right along with Dean Stockwell and Robert DeNiro) with every puff, with every tension filled exhale, or the angularity of her hold on the cigarette and it's magical ash gave raison d’etre to our imaginations as to what horrors lay behind this manicured perfection. It is Duvall who is haunted long before we find the horrors of the fabled Overlook hotel. Every word, every look feels chosen to decide the right intonation as to not piss off the ghoul in the car with her. Her movements, are repressed, her eyes devoid of that magic that made her so beloved, and it is only when all hell breaks loose that she begins to reveal again her supernatural soul. As her eyes widen, her screams unlock the cell of her prison door and out comes a woman driven by her will to survive. The magic is there again and through her reflective and scaling fight or flight responses; whether to her son's increasingly strange behavior, or the off putting eeriness of the house, or Jack’s bizarre typed refrain, we see the incarnate evil that has been unleashed be it human or other. The weight of both worlds seen and unseen stiffen her arms as she tries to swing a bat at her husband. Sit on her shoulders as she falls to her knees after locking him in a freezer. Without her otherworldly presence that doorway remains shut, and “The Shining” is merely one thing based in reality, or another based on the supernatural, rather then both operating simultaneously.

The magic of Shelley Duvall was that she was completely her own thing, and thus could be anything. Her style of acting in concert with her definitive looks made her appear both as something firmly from here and from somewhere else. She could've been “The Woman that Fell to Earth, or “Star Woman” or “Gandalf” or “Galadriel” by sheer quality of her alien like aura. Even as a “Rolling Stone” reporter in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” she seemed like something you'd find in a curio shop on a crisp fall day in a town in the nowhere. In a way, its as if she was discovered that way. Born and raised in Fort Worth, Texas in 1949 she was in her own house a bit of a curiosity. The oldest of four, she was nicknamed “manic mouse”. Eccentricity and energy already welded to her like sheet metal. She was discovered by Robert Altman in 1970, her essence already by then so palpable that she has won over just about everyone she ran into. She was genuine stardust. A reminder of what the best of us could achieve if only we let go of the safety of normalcy. She had no peers, no doppelgangers, no successors, we got one of her, and that was more than enough magic to make this world that much more bearable and believable as its own tale of sorts. A consummate storyteller in the form of an actor whose entire career was inviting us into our own imagination by letting her in.