One Tuesday in May, our dream of one day interviewing Shelley Duvall came true with a simple text from her partner of 30 years, Dan Gilroy: “She seems up to it, if you want to call now,” the message read, followed by a phone number with a Texas Hill Country area code.
Our hands were trembling as we sat down at our kitchen island and arranged our notes by the phone. After a few deep breaths and nervous glances at each other, we dialed the number.
Part of the anxiety of the moment stemmed from the fact that we so admired Shelley, but most of it came from our sheer uncertainty about what to expect. The legendary Texas-born actress had long ago bowed out of the spotlight, and rumors had swirled for years about her mental and physical health challenges and speculation about how they were tied to her career in Hollywood. The last thing we wanted was to have a conversation with Shelley that was anything but happy and positive.
After barely two rings, a familiar voice greeted us on the other end of the line.
“Hello! How are you?”
We could hear her smile through the phone. Her voice was joyful, calm, almost whimsical – completely and utterly unchanged from when the world first met and fell in love with her in the early 70s.
Right away, we decided we had to address what she was dealing with here: a pair of identical twins, tag-teaming her with questions. She couldn’t tell from a phone call, so we had to come clean, between a few nervous giggles.
“Oh no!” Shelley said with a chuckle. “You giggle alike.” We told her that that tendency of ours earned us the nickname “The Giggle Girls” back in elementary school. Some things never change.
In a quip that took us both by surprise, Shelley replied, “Glad to hear you still smiling. Although, you didn’t smile very much in The Shining.”
The three of us burst into laughter. Her sharp wit immediately relaxed us and made the chat feel more like a conversation with an old friend or family member than an interview. We explained to Shelley that we had been practicing our more serious sides almost every Halloween since we were teens, transforming into the Grady sisters from the Kubrick classic at everything from parties to local haunted houses.
“Oh, that’s great!” Shelley exclaimed.
Then it was time to get down to business. After all, it was an exciting time in Shelley’s career: She had recently filmed her first movie role in two decades. The Forest Hills, a horror thriller set to be released on October 4, follows a man’s descent into madness after being haunted by nightmares.
A lot has changed since Shelley last stepped foot on a set. But right off the bat, it was clear that she wasn’t stuck in her old ways. In fact, one of the most exciting parts about The Forest Hills shoot for her was that the film’s director, Scott Goldberg, partially directed her via Zoom.
“Oh, that was wonderful. With all the equipment available now, I mean, anybody can make a movie,” Shelley said. She added that the advancement in technology and its ability to provide a creative outlet for new storytellers was “fantastic.”
She paused for a moment. “I think it's really good. As long as everybody, you know, remains professional. You know, as an actor or actress, you still have to work with professional teams.”
Reflecting on how the film industry has changed since she got her start more than five decades earlier, Shelley said she believed it was always “headed in that direction.”
“And it was just becoming more and more fun to make a movie,” she added.
As our conversation with Shelley continued, it struck us that despite the fact that we were interviewing her, she was very interested in hearing about our own lives and careers. Correctly assuming we had done a bit of acting ourselves, she wanted to know about our favorite projects we worked on and what kinds of scenes we liked to film.
We realized quickly that it would be best to let go of what we planned to ask on the page and follow Shelley’s lead, and enjoyed her side anecdotes and stories as they came. References to her time working with Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman were paired with a warm tone and seemed to evoke happy memories for Shelley.
We asked if she had a favorite memory with Altman, with whom she worked on seven films throughout the 70s, and who helped catapult her from a rising actress to a full-fledged star.
“It's hard to [choose one]. After you've done so many, you really know each other well,” she said with a chuckle. “And so you came to understand each one of his choices.”
On whether she had a favorite film or TV show, Shelley said it was “too difficult to pick.”
“Because each one is so different. So you look at each one and say, Oh, here's what I liked about this one. Or, Here's what my favorite thing was. My favorite scene was.” Shelley then turned the question back to us, asking if we had a favorite scene from The Shining.
Though it’s hard to pick just one, we landed on the famous “Here’s Johnny” axe scene — one that she and costar Jack Nicholson famously shot dozens of times, until perfectionist Kubrick felt that they’d gotten it just right.
“But that makes it good,” Shelley said of Kubrick’s famous tendency to do many takes (The Shining holds the Guinness World Record for most retakes for one scene with dialogue — 148). “It gives you good practice. You really wanna please the director.”
Unlike Kubrick, Altman was known for his love of improvisation. Much of Shelley’s chatty dialogue as Millie Lammoreaux in his acclaimed 1977 film 3 Women was Shelley’s own ramblings. But for Shelley, the joy of improvisation comes after preparation.
“By the time they do those scenes, they're usually already in your mind, you know? And you keep those in mind and you really come up with new ways you can make them better.”
Close on-set relationships with her costars, which also included Sissy Spacek (3 Women), Bud Court (Brewster McCloud) and, of course, Robin Williams (Popeye), also largely contributed to Shelley’s ease of improvisation.
“I think [improvising] came together naturally, because of the characters that you are in real life as well as on screen,” she said. “I thought it was fun every day. There were always so many surprises. Like, didn't you think it was a surprise, the twins standing at the end of the hallway?” Shelley added with a laugh, referencing The Shining.
After a shameless in-sync performance of the “Come play with us, Danny,” line, which the two of us have practiced every Halloween for nearly two decades, Shelley replied, “Danny just said, Oh no!”
Speaking to the collaborative environment that comes with working with directors with whom she shared a mutual respect, Shelley said, “Everybody becomes a producer, really, of their own role. And when the director likes it, it makes you feel really good.”
Circling back to her return to acting in The Forest Hills, Shelley offered high praise for the film’s director: “And when Scott Goldberg tried his hand at it, he was really good too. He made movies in the style of Kubrick and Altman.”
Shelley was no stranger to the production side as well, particularly in the area of children’s entertainment. In addition to creating, producing and appearing in the enchanting children’s anthology series Faerie Tale Theatre and Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales & Legends, Shelley produced a number of other family entertainment projects that highlighted her unique talent for worldbuilding that resonated with both children and adults.
Speaking of style, we told Shelley about how several of our friends in their twenties were hoping to make their own name for themselves in the film industry. What would she say to a younger filmmaker, producer or actor who wants to stand out in some way, but they don't know how to be different? How can they make something that’s true to who they are as an artist? Her answer was short, but poignant.
“You are different.”
She continued with an analogy: “You know, you can't just change a dress and say, Okay, that's a new character.”
We added our own thoughts, to which Shelley agreed with a sharp “right” — each filmmaker or performer’s strength lies in what only they can bring to the character.
It makes sense, then, how one of Shelley’s most iconic looks — her long, feathery eyelashes worn by her character in her first film, 1970’s Brewster McCloud — was actually worn by Shelley first in her real life. Indeed, it was who Shelley was that made that character so memorable.
“So you need to make everything you do in your movie, true to you,” Shelley said.
Perhaps Shelley’s deep-rooted sense of self came, in part, from her upbringing in and love for her home state of Texas. It was where her life and career began, and where she chose to retire and live out her golden years. After decades in Hollywood, Shelley seemed content to enjoy the simple pleasures of the southern spring day from where she was calling.
“Growing up here was wonderful,” she gushed. “You got to meet so many different people, and you meet characters from all over the world. That's one of the things I liked about it.”
On what it’s like living in Texas versus a big city like New York or Los Angeles, Shelley added, “You learned that there are places sort of similar everywhere. No, it’s really good.”
It was at this point in the conversation that the two of us looked down at our notes, and realized we had covered everything we’d hoped to. Or, at least planned to. But there were other things that we wanted to ask, and something inside of us felt that Shelley was up for sharing a little more wisdom.
“Shelley, we've both been single for way too long,” Cailin said with a laugh. “But we're really inspired by your enduring relationship with Dan and the way that you've been by each other's sides for decades since you met back on set [of Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme]. What advice would you give to someone who is looking for the right person to spend the rest of their life with?”
Shelley seemed unphased by the turn of questioning. “I don't think you have to make that decision. I think that you can enjoy being single. And you, you know, your pets become your friends.”
Every so often, an image of Shelley bathing a pet iguana in a sink makes its rounds on social media. In it, she flashes a huge smile as she splashes water on the lizard, named Hasbro. And although Shelley is an animal lover who had many pets of her own through the years, Hasbro wasn’t one of them: He was actually one of her costars in Trevor Rabin’s 1989 “Something to Hold on To” music video. But owning exotic pets, particularly birds, is something we had in common with Shelley.
In fact, in her interview for Vivian Kubrick’s Making 'The Shining' documentary (which Shelley agreed was a great behind-the-scenes look into her time on set), you could hear her pet birds at the time chirping away in the background.
With a laugh, Shelley told us that even her birds have a flair for the performing arts: “They each know several little tricks that they do to impress people.”
Their tricks didn’t go without treats, though. “One bird even said ‘juice,’ Shelley recalled. "She liked juice. Orange or lime or lemon." The bird also, evidently, asked for an apple when she had a hankering. “And then the other birds learn from them! They have each other to talk to. That's actually one of the nice things about having a twin.” We agreed. It was funny that Shelley was still thinking about our own experiences and perspectives, but we'd already learned that was not unlike her.
Shelley had so many birds, she'd used one of her bedrooms as an indoor aviary. And famous as she was, she reveled in the simple tasks that came with keeping pets.
“They love it when you change their paper,” she said.
We told Shelley a little about our lives in New York City. The Biltmore Hotel, a luxury hotel located in midtown Manhattan until its closure in 1981, clearly held strong memories for her. We asked if she spent much time in New York for her acting career, or if the work was mostly in Los Angeles.
“It was mostly Los Angeles. What do you think?” she replied. “But then going to New York became all that more special.”
And what did she think of Los Angeles? “I love L.A.,” she said. “Randy Newman wrote the song. And it became a number one hit in Los Angeles.”
Stepping back into the spotlight for the first time in two decades, ironically, felt like more of a rebirth than a return to her roots for Shelley. “Everything is a new experience,” she said of coming back for another film.
The two of us often talk about how no matter how many interviews we do, we will always be a little nervous whenever we meet someone new. We wondered if she ever felt nervous when taking on a new role.
“Oh, of course, everybody does,” she said.
How does she overcome it? “Take a deep breath and then once the first few words come out, you sort of get into it and you say, Oh, I know the character now. You feel much more comfortable.”
We had this sense that Shelley, generous and easygoing as she was, would be down to talk for several more hours. But mindful of her time, we decided to start wrapping up our chat. We told her what a pleasure it had been and how much we admired her, and she replied with an earnest, “Thank you. That's really nice. Makes you feel good to get a compliment.”
We asked if she had anything she’d like to say to her fans who have been supporting her all these years.
“Yes. If you love acting, keep on acting and try a few other things while you're at it too. You know, like making things, but you don't wanna ruin any set pieces or costumes or anything like that,” Shelley said.
After she passed away a few months later, tributes from thousands of fans and industry peers said it all: there will simply never be another Shelley Duvall. Her unique beauty, charm and presence both onscreen and off was one of a kind, and even in her later years, she was still eager to share it with others.
In the final moments of our call with Shelley, she offered one more suggestion to anyone reading: “And you might make a flower for one of your dresses.”
Then she added, “Just to make it different.”
As we hung up the phone, it occurred to us that this, in just five words, spoke to Shelley’s legacy.
When we heard the news about her death, our minds went back to our conversation with Shelley. Though we couldn’t look her in the eyes, we were struck by how content and at peace she seemed. Physically, her life ended in the same place it started, and she remained the same pure soul that catapulted her to fame decades before.
We couldn’t help but think that we should all be so lucky to live a life like Shelley’s: to touch others just by being yourself, and to remain the same person at heart, only changed by the fond memories of people, places and triumphs to look back on.
The Forest Hills begins its theatrical run in the United States and Canada on October 4, 2024.