Interview with Shelley Duvall | Interviews

How was it, working with Kubrick? I asked. "Almost unbearable," she said, matter-of-factly. "But from other points of view, really very nice, I suppose."

She was standing next to an ornately carved old hat tree, covered with eccentric hats, and she pulled one down. "I got this in England, and I think it looks just like Olive Oyl. And I told Robin Williams that at the premiere I'd wear Olive's clumpy old shoes if he'd wear the arms...You know, the big Popeye arms they gave him? And a short-sleeve tuxedo."

We took our tea and settled down in the book-lined living room, Shelley fussing over the teacups almost like Milly, the character she played in Robert Altman's "3 Women," the character so domesticated she had all her tuna-and-potato-chip-casserole recipes color-coded according to how many minutes each one took to make. She winced. "Hold on," she said, "here comes that little pain again. It only comes about twice a week now, and stays about two minutes. When I was in England, after 'The Shining,' I made a movie called 'The Time Bandits' for Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python fame. And the scene called for six dwarfs to come crashing through the roof of a medieval carriage, but the dwarfs were a bit afraid of jumping off the scaffold, and so Terry didn't think, he just jumped, and he weighs 180 pounds and landed on my head. I could have been paralyzed. As it is, there's just a pain that comes through my ears to my eye, and then goes away. I'm sure it can be fixed."

I sipped my cup of Constant Comment and enjoyed being with her. Shelley Duvall is like a precious piece of china. She looks and sounds like almost nobody else, and if it is true that she was born to play the character Olive Oyl (and does so in Altman's new musical "Popeye"), it is also true that she has possibly played more really different kinds of characters than almost any other young actress of the 1970s. In all of her roles, there is an openness about her, as if somehow nothing has come between her open face and our eyes -- no camera, dialogue, makeup, method of acting -- and she is just spontaneously being the character. You sense that as much in "3 Women," where she flirts with men who ignore her, as in "Thieves Like Us," where she smokes a cigarette like nobody else, or in "Nashville," where she's a goofy groupie, or in "Popeye," where she wrestles with an octopus.