After more than two decades away from the public eye Shelley Duvall talks about her mysterious retirement from acting and what inspired her her return to Hollywood.
In a long one New York Times Profile, the 74-year-old talks about her far-reaching career after she made her acting debut in director Robert Altman’s 1970 dark comedy Brewster McCloud. Duvall later had acclaimed leading roles in films such as Popeye And The glow She won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role in the 1977 drama 3 women. In the 1980s, she began producing television programs for children and young people and received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations.
In 2002, Duvall appeared in her final film: Manna from heavenbefore she announced her retirement from acting.
“I was a star; I had leading roles,” she tells the outlet. “People think it’s just aging, but that’s not the case. It’s violence. How would you feel if people were really nice and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye”—she snapped her fingers—“they turned on you? You would never do that.” Believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt because you can’t really believe it’s true.
Dan Gilroy, the actress’ partner of more than 30 years, recalls their life in Los Angeles before the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged Duvall’s home, and then in Texas, where they moved after her brothers became ill.
“It was great all those years in LA, really great,” Gilroy says NOW. “And when we moved after the earthquake, Texas was great. Things went downhill when she started getting scared of things, maybe she didn’t want to work. It’s really hard to pin it down to anything.”
Gilroy says the damning record of events has haunted Duvall. “She became paranoid and just suffered from delusions because she thought she was being attacked,” he says. “She tried to call the FBI and asked our neighbor to protect us… It was just shocking that all of a sudden, completely normal, things went so wrong.”
Things changed when Duvall was a guest at one controversial episode of the daytime talk show Dr. Phil in 2016. The episode was titled “A Hollywood Star’s Descent into Mental Illness: Saving The Shining’s Shelley Duvall” and, according to Gilroy, was filmed without his knowledge.
“Days later, I found out from people in town that it had happened,” Gilroy said NOW the episode in which Duvall made several troubling claims.
“I am very sick. I need help,” Duvall told host Dr. Phil McGraw. “Well, that’s why I’m here,” he replied.
That was back then Brewster McCloud Star’s statements included claiming she had seen the late Robin Williams, with whom she starred in the 1980s Popeye – since he died in 2014. She claimed that he wasn’t really dead and was “changing.” She also claimed that the “Sheriff of Nottingham” had threatened her and that there was a “worrying” disc inside her.
Although The episode was never broadcast in its entiretythe damage was done.
“It didn’t do anything for her,” Gilroy says of the show. “It just put her on the map as an oddity.”
Last June, the former daytime presenter appeared on Who’s talking to Chris Wallace?in which he said he had no regrets about the interview, despite many – including Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Vivian – public criticism of the show as exploitative and sensationalistic.
“I don’t regret what I did,” McGraw said. “I regret that it was promoted in a way that people felt was unseemly.”
“There are parts of this story that I haven’t talked about and won’t talk about in detail, but I can say generally that we have worked with her family [and] She subsequently accompanied her off-camera for over a year and offered her options for inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment. I can’t tell you how much we’ve been through,” he added.
Now, Duvall has officially come out of retirement with her role as Mom in writer-director Scott Goldberg’s horror film. The forest hills.
The film also stars Edward Furlong, Chiko Mendez, Dee Wallace and Felissa Rose. The forest hills is about a disturbed man who is plagued by nightmarish visions after suffering head trauma while camping in the Catskill Mountains.
Duvall plays the mother of the mentally and emotionally disturbed Rico (Mendez), who serves as his inner voice.
When asked how she came to be involved in the project, Duvall simply says, “I wanted to act again. And then this guy kept calling, and so I finally did it.”
When The actress spoke to ET ahead of the film’s initial release date In March 2023 she was happy about her return to the big screen.
“I know it’s been a long time,” Duvall told ET, “but it’s been great. It really is, it feels good. It makes me want to act more.”
“It’s actually so much fun to be in a movie,” she said of returning to set. “I should cherish every minute of it.”
Duvall’s co-stars also expressed their excitement about working with her. “I couldn’t have done it without her,” Mendez said. “We need each other because action is not acting, but reacting.”
It may have been a long break, but Duvall is confident she will return with the right role and casting. “You don’t want to have to do every role that comes to your mind, every movie that comes to your mind,” she said. “You want to be able to choose.”
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