The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd

There was something illusory about Shelley Duvall’s movie career. Not in the sense that her talent, charisma, and presence weren’t real, but in how deceptively selective she was in showing it off. A viewer making their way through classics of the ’70s and ’80s, or the filmographies of certain high-profile directors, might well catch her repeatedly: Annie Hall, The Shining, Nashville. Ex-children born in a particular era might also recall her appearances in Time Bandits and the live-action Popeye, or her status as the impresario of Faerie Tale Theatre. (Plus, for the baby goths and the Tim Burton completists, she was the mom in the original Frankenweenie short.) Put together, this all implies a lot more Shelley Duvall work in the world than actually exists, an illusion aided by the wealth of her other collaborations with Robert Altman.

The truth is, her Altman movies aren’t just the introduction of Duvall into the movies, but the skeleton of her filmography. (The Shining is such a misleading outlier as a primary role for a non-Altman director that it’s helped to create the mistaken impression that Stanley Kubrick left her barely functional as an actress.) For the first decade of her acting career, she worked primarily with Altman. For the second decade of her acting career, she popped up occasionally in supporting parts, like her best-friend work in Roxanne. For the third and fourth decades, well, those didn’t really exist. When she died earlier this year, she had made one movie in the past two 20 years.

Her old pal Robert Altman, on the other hand, barely slowed down, making a movie a year for much of his time as a name director, even when he was on the outs with Hollywood. Duvall’s greatest period of movie-acting productivity seemed to mainly involve keeping pace with him—which she still didn’t, because making seven movies in ten years wasn’t enough when he was making twice as many. (She did also appear in some TV guest spots during this period.) It’s a testament to the impression Duvall made, as well as how her screen persona developed with Altman, that some viewers might forget just how few movies she actually made.

That scarcity makes sense given that Shelley Duvall apparently had no particular designs on acting. Altman met Duvall while he was making Brewster McCloud, his loopy follow-up to M*A*S*H, and cast her as the title character’s tour-guide love interest based on looks and vibes more than on-screen experience, of which she had none. It’s hard for an actor to really pop out in the hustle and bustle of this strange movie about strange young Brewster (Bud Cort) attempting to build himself working wings while dodging suspicion that he may be a serial killer. But even in the circus-like atmosphere of McCloud (literally; the cast is introduced while dressed as circus performers over the end credits), Duvall’s Suzanne stands out, with her skinny frame, striped shirt, and cartoonishly extended eyelashes, the latter of which were part of Duvall’s look at the time. Altman isn’t particularly satirizing Suzanne’s outlandishness, but she does make for a notable contrast between Brewster, who looks meek but is genuinely eccentric and possibly disturbed, and this young woman who makes a spectacle of herself on a purely aesthetic level.

Altman continued shuffling Duvall through sprawling casts in eye-catching costumes, including a pair of revisionist westerns, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the lesser-known Buffalo Bill And The Indians, Or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. McCabe casts Duvall as Ida Coyle, a mail-order bride turned prostitute, one of many characters struggling through the cobbled-together imitation of society in early-twentieth-century Washington state. Buffalo Bill takes a more satirical tack; it’s halfway between the wackiness of McCloud and the more sobering version of American history seen in McCabe. It also has an unusually strong central figure in the form of one Paul Newman, playing Buffalo Bill in his later years, running a rodeo-style circus that burnishes and distorts his past exploits. Duvall’s appearance here is even briefer, as she’s done up fancy to play Mrs. Grover Cleveland.

For that matter, Duvall’s role in Altman’s far more popular and acclaimed Nashville isn’t especially more robust. She plays a young woman who has rebranded herself as “L.A. Joan,” visiting her uncle and ailing aunt in Nashville while concerned primarily with meeting various music-industry types, eventually infuriating her uncle by failing to show up for her aunt’s funeral. L.A. Joan may not be quite as stylized as Suzanne or Frances Cleveland, but she remains similarly opaque. It’s not that Altman isn’t curious about the inner lives of these characters so much as he allows them some ensemble-driven privacy, even as his camera catches offhand moments. Nashville isn’t a movie that has space for L.A. Joan to really explore or explain herself, or undergo a major transformation. It observes her, and dozens of others, adopting a sort of sink-or-swim method to both the characters and actors—which probably serves Altman’s aims either way.

Duvall’s first opportunity to do more than swim came the year before Nashville, in Altman’s crime picture Thieves Like Us. She plays Keechie, the daughter of a mechanic in 1930s Mississippi, who meets and winds up caring for escaped criminal Bowie (Keith Carradine). By taking up with a young criminal, Keechie sets up some parallels to Suzanne, Duvall’s love-interest character from Brewster McCloud, but with a bit of the desolation of her frontier wife in McCabe. Essentially tasked with the innocent-farmer’s-daughter role, Duvall plays Keechie with understated innocence. “Most girls have a fella,” Bowie points out during one of their first conversations. “I don’t know what most girls have,” Keechie responds, plainly. In those early scenes, she keeps eking out smiles toward Bowie that look just shy of private.

They abruptly get a home together and start performing domesticity, which for a bank robber means spats about his dangerous and illegal profession, and making farfetched plans to escape to a life of married bliss. Altman’s downtime-heavy approach to depicting a life of crime gives Duvall a lot of screen time, while nonetheless knowingly reducing Keechie’s specific sheltered sweetness to something tragically stock: waiting, worrying, pregnant, and finally grieving, alone. Her goals are modest, clear, and unfulfilled, all the starker for coming in the midst of so many ensemble pieces. More than ever, it’s Duvall’s eyes and physicality, rather than her costumes, that serve as windows to her character’s soul.

Duvall’s modesty in Thieves Like Us represent an outlier in her films with Altman, where she often floats through the narrative sporting distinctive fashions. This makes 3 Women feel like the most intimate of the bunch, because it takes such a close look at what goes into that preparation. Altman’s camera is constantly catching images of Millie (Duvall) and her new friend/protégé/stalker Pinky (Sissy Spacek) framed by mirrors, and Millie in particular is often fussing over her precise, yellow-heavy aesthetic, forever preparing, as Roger Ebert pointed out, for hot dates that never seem to actually materialize. Pinky is a newcomer to the old-folks spa where Millie works, and immediately attaches herself to Millie like an obsessed kid sister, eventually becoming her bedroom-sharing roommate.

3 Women takes place in a California desert town that seems to have a population of about two-dozen, and there is plenty of evidence that Millie is nonetheless not the most glamorous woman in town. But Millie does her best to ignore it, which seems to be all that Pinky needs to go along, and after a series of Altman ensemble pictures, the relative quiet of the movie—we can hear almost every line of dialogue with clarity, no matter how ridiculous Millie or Pinky sounds—is unnerving. (Thieves Like Us has some of this quiet, but also occasional screeching tires or gunfire.) Technically, the film’s aims don’t seem wildly different from something like Nashville; once again, offhand details or moments of human comedy conceal a deeper sadness. But the pared-down refocusing of Altman’s style in 3 Women shifts its tone; it’s at once funnier and scarier, because the characters seem so much more fragile from the outset. Millie—employed, independent, rigorously adhering to her sense of style—has things more traditionally together than Nashville’s L.A. Joan. Yet, alone in those mirror frames, ignored or laughed at by the other adults around her, Millie looks more like a girl playing at womanhood.

Despite all this, it would be easy enough to ascribe the movie’s heavy lifting to Spacek. We’re keyed into her point of view for much of the first half, and she then undergoes an eerie, unexplained transformation in the second half as she awakes from a coma and assumes Millie’s dominance in their now-reversed relationship. (And indeed, she’s terrific throughout.) But Pinky is young enough that somehow her character shift, strange as it is, has some deniability: Maybe she’s just young, trying out another persona. Duvall, on the other hand, looks genuinely shaken loose, no longer blithely occupying the middle ground between Pinky’s childishness and the more clearly grown-up Willie (Janice Rule). In the context of the movies they did immediately before this one, especially the ensemble films, it feels almost as if Altman has plucked Duvall from his own crowd, and zoomed in on her until the mystery and whimsical glamour of characters like Suzanne or L.A. Joan become something genuinely discomfiting. By the end of 3 Women, she’s further away than ever from playing a “normal” love interest, instead arriving at what seems like an unspoken compromise as Pinky’s mother figure.

There’s a straight line—or anyway, some kind of a line—between Millie’s deliberate domesticity and Duvall’s role as a terrorized wife and mother in Kubrick’s The Shining. But her other part in a big-studio movie from 1980 brought her back to love-interest territory in a way that was both perfectly fitting of Duvall’s specific vibe, and weirdly anticipatory of how acclaimed actors are now mixed and matched into pre-existing characters and expected to treat it as an honor. As common as the practice is now, it nonetheless takes a particular type of actress to reach a culmination of her big-screen career by playing a live-action version of the cartoon character Olive Oyl, particularly back in 1980. But that’s just what Duvall did. The same year as The Shining, she played the more mildly terrorized love interest of Popeye the Sailor Man, played with startling cartoon accuracy by Robin Williams.

As Olive, Duvall has more dialogue than in any of her other Altman movies, besides possibly 3 Women; more than some of them combined, even, though a lot of her lines amount to comic dithering. She also gets to do a bunch of stuff that would have been described as normal leading-lady duties in movies a few decades earlier: She falls in love with a sensitive-but-tough leading man, she sings and dances, she parents a child, she performs slapstick, and, uh, she gets threatened by a giant octopus. (Maybe that last one is more for the cartoons.) But Duvall doesn’t do any of this in quite the traditional way, even given that she’s playing a live-action Olive Oyl. Take her warbling, wavering rendition of “He Needs Me,” a song that gained further fame when Paul Thomas Anderson repurposed it for Punch-Drunk Love. It’s the only song in the movie that feels capable of floating outside of it and settling somewhere else, somehow cartoonish and delicately timeless all at once. Even weirder is “He’s Large,” perhaps the least enthusiastic love song in movie-musical history.

Popeye, full of sight gags and silly songs, is not the most evocative of Altman’s films. It’s not a mood piece or a treatise on American nature. Mostly, it feels like a tribute to the old cartoons and the actors, especially Williams and Duvall, who can make such a meal out of bringing them to life. It’s an old-fashioned star vehicle that happens to be a deeply odd experiment. At the same time, there are parallels between Popeye and other Altman/Duvall movies, suggesting that its world, consciously or not, functions as a more accessible, family-friendly version of them. The ramshackle and isolated town of Sweethaven is like a more whimsical version of Presbyterian Church, Washington, the settlement in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, with threats of pratfalls into the ocean or absurd penalties levied by an overzealous tax collector rather than the pitiless frontier violence of the Western. Olive herself is introduced in a sequence where she primps for a party and is often framed in mirrors, like Millie in 3 Women; she even has a similarly yellow-accented bedroom. And like most of Duvall’s characters for Altman, Olive Oyl’s outfits are, resorting to an overused term, iconic.

In the context of Duvall and Altman’s work together, Popeye also provides a lovely happy ending, with Olive Oyl sighing with admiration over Popeye’s heroics—an unambiguous blast of warmth after so many movies that leave her characters unfulfilled or uncertain. It turned out to be a farewell to Duvall’s short and strange leading-lady career, too; after this movie, it was supporting parts only, and nothing more for Altman. She moved back to her native Texas when she took a small role in Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath, and had a long-term relationship with musician Dan Gilroy (not to be confused with the filmmaker). She struggled with some form of unspecified mental illness, though a few interviews and accounts from the last few years indicate she was largely at peace with her life away from Hollywood. Her film legacy was assured by the end of 1980; Faerie Tale Theatre added on a whole other TV legacy by the end of the following decade. It makes sense that she’d recruit actors and filmmakers into TV fantasy, as she was so natural at bridging the ethereal and the everyday.

Altman, of course, did make some other great movies after 1980. But is it the lack of a Duvall figure that wounds some of the lesser ones like Ready To Wear or Dr. T And The Women, ensemble movies that feel specifically in conversation with his ’70s work? At the very least, there are times when Duvall’s absence feels, if not pronounced, like an occasional but nagging feeling of incompleteness, as maybe it should after watching her emerge from the crowd to make something as transfixing and unusual as 3 Women. That may, in the end, be why it’s easy to assume Shelley Duvall must have been in more than the two-dozen or so movies that make up her filmography, or starred in more than four: Once you’ve found her, it doesn’t make much sense to let her go.