I was half an hour into a Halloween-season rewatch of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, catching it on the big screen for the first time in decades, when it hit me. The actor carrying this movie isn't Jack Nicholson. It's Shelley Duvall.
Duvall, who died in 2024 at age 75, was in her late 20s when she made the film, based on Stephen King's spookfest novel. She endured a punishing schedule of retakes with Nicholson and Kubrick that left her emotionally drained. Her performance drew mixed and often negative reviews and even earned her a nomination for a Razzie Award, which was later rescinded.
What I missed — along with a lot of other filmgoers — was the fact that Duvall was doing something subtle. Against the backdrop of a horror movie, she delivered a powerful, grounded portrayal of Wendy, a woman trapped in a marriage with an increasingly dangerous man.
Nicholson's performance is still a ton of fun. But nearly half a century after the picture premiered in 1980, his acting reads a little clownish. His Jack Torrance is a B-movie monster. He smacks his lips, leers at the camera and delivers "Here's Johnny!" style catchphrases with relish.
In hindsight, it's hard to see any of this working or feeling remotely scary if Duvall hadn't played the business perfectly straight. It's her performance that anchors the sense that this is happening in the real world, with real stakes. In fact, when the movie begins, Wendy is already experiencing an entirely realistic kind of horror.
Her husband is an unemployed former teacher, an aspiring author with writer's block and a history of alcoholism. He dislocated their son Danny's shoulder in a drunken rage. This woman isn't afraid of ghosts. She's afraid of the man sleeping in her bed. Duvall makes it all terrifyingly plausible.
I remembered Wendy as a dreary victim, a kind of punching bag, knocked around by Jack's flamboyant, scene-stealing rage. She cringes, she simpers, she shrieks and then she flees. The movie's poster shows her remarkable American Gothic face twisted into a scream.
But it turns out Duvall's Wendy is actually a kind of proto-action hero. After the family arrives at the haunted Overlook Hotel, it's Wendy who turns out to be the competent one. Jack is the official caretaker, but while he gripes and sulks, Wendy gets busy taking care of the heating system, staying in touch with the forest rangers, monitoring the weather, cooking and learning the lay of the land.
Which makes what happens next believable. As Jack begins to change, Wendy grows wary. She keeps a closer eye on Danny. She arms herself with a baseball bat. When Jack transforms into a full-blown shambling ogre, Wendy is terrified, sure, but she's also fully prepared to kick his ass.
In their first fight, she knocks him out cold, then drags his dead weight down a flight of stairs and locks him in a freezer. "Your wife appears to be stronger than we imagined, Mr. Torrance, somewhat more resourceful," mocks Grady the ghost. "She seems to have gotten the better of you."
Indeed. And Duvall makes it work. A year after Sigourney Weaver played the hero in Alien and four years before Linda Hamilton gave us Sarah Connor in The Terminator, Duvall's subtle, evolving performance made Wendy into a haunt-battling warrior.
The screenplay for The Shining, co-authored by Diane Johnson, cleverly sets audiences up to expect Danny's supernatural powers to save the day. Or maybe Dick Hallorann will come to the rescue. But in the end it's all up to Wendy.
If you haven't watched The Shining in a while, give it another look, especially the final scenes. Nicholson's Jack puts on a noisy show. He shouts threats and smashes doors and even murders poor Hallorann with an axe. But he never manages to lay a hand on his wife or son. Duvall's Wendy stays one step ahead of him, showing main character energy right to the end.
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