If Shelley Duvall appeared in a crowd, your eye would instantly find her: a slender woman with sharp-angled arms and hips, saucer eyes, a swan’s neck, a tulip-bud mouth, a gap between her front teeth, and legs so long that she seemed much taller than her five-foot-eight height. (At her Fort Worth, Texas high school, her nickname was Sparrowlegs.) If you heard Duvall’s voice issuing from a tiny TV at low volume on the other side of an apartment, you’d know it was her, with that fluttery clarinet tone and those North Texas-accented words butting up against one another.
Nobody looked like her, sounded like her, or acted like her. She was an aspirational figure for any woman with dreams and skills who was told she wasn’t the right type to make it in show business. She was an oddball fairy tale princess.
And in the 1980s, she built a kingdom, moving behind the camera to create three fantasy series, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theater, Tall Tales and Legends, and Shelley Duvall’s Bedtime Stories . Duvall died today at 75 of complications from diabetes at her home in Blanco, Texas, according to a statement by her partner of 40 years, musician Dan Gilroy. She appeared in some of the greatest works of the most seismically inventive era of American movies.
Many were directed by her mentor Robert Altman, including Brewster McCloud (her screen debut), McCabe and Mrs. Miller , Thieves Like Us , Nashville , Buffalo Bill and the Indians , and Popeye . The latter saw Duvall sing.