“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime”—she snapped her fingers—“they turn on you?” Duvall told the New York Times earlier this year about her retreat from public life. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”
Shelley Duvall was unforgettable. She was particular. She was a beauty. But she was those things as a 20-something star and as a 75-year-old survivor of the Hollywood machine.
What are the photos I hope show up at my funeral? The ones where I’m young and hot? Isn’t that kind of how I still think of myself, even though a surprising glimpse in the mirror tells a different story? I can think of many photos from my youth I’d like to be remembered by—there’s one portrait in particular my daughter shared to her Instagram story just last week with the caption “got it from my mama,” and you know I gleefully reshared it. But just those photos wouldn’t tell the whole story. The me as I was as a new mom, nursing my baby, the me now, gamely trying a two-piece at the beach for the first time in 15 years and feeling ridiculous but saltily free, the me, I hope, of 40 years from now, with a face I can’t imagine.
“My dear, sweet, wonderful life partner and friend left us. Too much suffering lately, now she’s free,” Dan Gilroy, Duvall’s partner since 1989, said of her death. I think of all the photos he surely has of his love, all the moments captured between the days when we celebrated Duvall for being a “saucer-eyed, rail-thin waif” and the day, decades later, when she had to leave him.
“Fly away, beautiful Shelley,” he said.
There are some phenomenal public photos of Duvall in the last years of her life; The Hollywood Reporter made some portraits of the actress against the backdrop of her home for the last 40 or so years, the Texas hill country. But the one I love most is in that Times profile: Duvall is looking over her shoulder, straight at the viewer. Her gray hair is swooped into a messy topknot secured with multiple scrunchies, her face is lined and bare, and her eyes are huge and clear. She looks like a 74-year-old woman. She looks aged. She looks intelligent, a little weary, but like she might be about to laugh, like she’s in on a joke. She looks like herself.