Flashback: Shelley Duvall Battles Jack Nicholson’ in ‘The Shining’

The sad news came down earlier today that actress Shelley Duvall died in her sleep of complications related to diabetes. She was 75. “My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us,” Dan Gilroy, her life partner, said in a statement.

“Too much suffering lately, now she’s free. Fly away, beautiful Shelley.” Duvall was one of the most celebrated and accomplished actresses of the Seventies.

Director Robert Altman launched her career by giving her one of the lead roles in his 1970 classic Brewster McCloud . He continued to work with her in the years that followed in McCabe & Mrs. Miller , Thieves Like Us , Nashville , and 3 Women .

Woody Allen gave her an opportunity to show off her comic chops in 1977’s Woody Allen, three years before she reunited with Altman to portray Olive Oyl alongside Robin Williams in Popeye. But she left her largest pop culture footprint right before Popeye when Stanley Kubrick cast her as Wendy Torrance in his adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining . It was a long, punishing shoot where Duvall’s character was in a state of hysteria for much of the time.

“Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable,” Duvall told Roger Ebert in December of 1980. “Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time. And in my character, I had to cry 12 hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week.

I was there a year and a month, and there must be s.