In Memoriam: Shelley Duvall

There was a lot in the Shelley Duvall story, much of which she talked about herself, some of which she didn’t want to talk about at all, and so I’ll let her own words, or lack of them, on all those matters speak for themselves. I just want to think about her and her work. I want to think about how she was so impossibly idiosyncratic and ethereal, so unique in her appearance, and her voice, and her air, that there was no one like Shelley Duvall, and that in all those Robert Altman movies she was giving performances that no one on this planet and probably the next few planets over could have given. I want to think about how she didn’t so much steal “Annie Hall” with one of those lines that I sometimes say to myself apropos of nothing as just leave an indelible imprint right in the middle of a movie chock full of indelible moments. I want to think about how my younger sister was for a time in her life obsessed with Faerie Tale Theatre and how a lasting memory of myriad family vacations is my sister in the backseat next to me, pretending to host Faerie Tale Theatre and saying, over and over, “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall.” But over the years here at Cinema Romantico a tradition has emerged in that we honor the newly fallen of one our personal favorites, “Roxanne” (1987), by commemorating their work in it. 

We have commemorated Fred Willard that way, and Michael J. Pollard too, both eccentric actors playing eccentrics in “Roxanne” and embodying a movie set in a ski town that is full of eccentrics, including the Cyrano-like fire chief C.D. Bales (Steve Martin). But in playing Dixie, owner of the diner where everyone congregates, Duvall proves the mama bear of the whole slightly off-center town, playing the most level-headed of the bunch, including C.D. It’s a trip getting to see Duvall be the calm counterpoint to the wild comic energy of her co-star, all visually summarized in the brief scene where Dixie sports C.D.’s fire chief ballcap. He might have been in charge of the fire department, but she put out the fires.

Duvall died on Thursday. She was 75.