When Shelley Duvall was cast to play Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s “ The Shining ” (1980), the film she would become most famous for, it was overwhelmingly the most mainstream movie she’d ever done — but more to the point, it was the most mainstream character . Duvall, who died July 11 at 75, had spent the better part of a decade playing vibrant kooks and eccentrics in Robert Altman movies (and in case you think “kook” sounds pejorative, there was never anything pejorative about it when Shelley Duvall played one). She had also rocked that cameo in “Annie Hall” as a Rolling Stone reporter who dates Alvy Singer and says, “Sex with you is really a Kafakesque experience.
” But in “The Shining,” Duvall, with her feather voice and beaming doll-like features, was suddenly called on to incarnate the essence of normality. And she did it as if born to it. She played Wendy in long black lank hair, toning down her natural Texas drawl to something that sounded more neutral and Midwestern.
The film presents Wendy as the earnest soul of traditional middle-class American womanhood, a homemaker who’s devoted enough to try and make a home out of the Overlook Hotel, a cavernous resort nestled in the Colorado Rockies. Her husband, Jack, played by a Jack Nicholson who looks like he can’t wait to get out of his box, plans to spend the winter squirreled away there, pounding on his typewriter as he tries to launch his career as a novelist. It’s up to Wendy to sup.