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10 Essential Shelley Duvall Performances
This body of work paints a picture of an artist paving her own zigzagging path across showbusiness.
Plucked from obscurity after meeting Robert Altman at a party, a 21-year-old Shelley Duvall made her screen debut in the director’s daft black comedy about a bespectacled loner (Bud Cort, doing a kind of dry run to Harold Chasen) who lives in a fallout shelter and tinkers away at a homemade flying machine. With her big, expressive eyes framed by painted lashes, her dialogue delivered in a drawling singsong, the then-unknown actress offers what you could call a proto manic pixie dream girl; her loopy free-spiritedness gives Brewster McCloud — the character and the movie — a shot of life, at least until the betrayal and dark fatalism of the ending. Yet Duvall is so naturally charismatic in the bit role, transforming a walking punch line into a person (“With Shelley, it was clear she was giving that character — only words on the page — a real life,” Allen recently said following her death), that she ends up throwing Alvy’s miserable qualities into sharper relief.
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