A tribute to Shelley Duvall, the queen of awkward beauty

Like many kids born in the 90s and 00s, my first encounter with Shelley Duvall was in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining, the now-iconic scene of the Texas-born actor letting out an Edvard Munch scream, eyes bulging in fear as she hides from her axe-wielding, murderous husband, played by Jack Nicholson. Far from her only memorable role, however, perhaps what’s drawn me most to Duvall since that first experience is just how malleable she is as an artist. The queen of “awkward beauty”, her gawky on-screen presence is exactly what made her characters so memorable – an oddball with a broken-doll voice and a fairy tale imagination, a wide-eyed scream queen whose unusual charm cements her as one of the most magnetic on-screen presences of the last century.

With a face so bambi-esque that she’s the epitome of what many online beauty-goers would now label ‘deer pretty’, decades before Instagram face would dominate beauty standards, Duvall occupied an unconventional space in Hollywood. Yet it’s precisely these physical qualities that made her such a perfect fit for the characters she played, like the utterly weird role of Olive Oyl in Roger Altman’s delirious live action musical Popeye. Here, her slapstick mannerisms and eccentric on-screen persona was turned caricature, paired with minimal make-up and gravity-defying hair. Altman, a longtime supporter of Duvall, called her casting a “deal-breaker” saying that “nobody else could have played Olive Oyl like Shelley. Nobody else looks like that.”

Duvall is again instantly recognisable in her role in Altman’s Brewster Mccloud, where she’s depicted sporting spidery long lashes, hair windswept and tousled ever so slightly, while the scene of her as Raggedy Ann in a bright orange bob and doll face is one of the most memorable aesthetic scenes in Altman’s oeuvre, and mind – this was decades before Milla Jovovich’s characterisation of Leeloo in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element.

Duvall was a shapeshifter – I struggle to think of someone who’s played as many varied roles throughout her career. Take her bombshell role in Nashville (1975), where she plays the obnoxious heartbreaker LA Joan. Or a Rolling Stones journalist in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), who describes sex with the protagonist as “a Kafka-esque experience”, whose beauty seems almost spectral, her barely-there brows and long brown hair almost as haunting as her role as Mrs Frankenstein in a not-yet-famous Tim Burton’s dark comedy Frankenweenie (1984).

It feels an unnatural position for me to describe a female actor’s beauty – because let’s face it, it’s 2024 and we’re trying to move past that – but there’s a relatability to Duvall’s strangeness, all bug-eyed expressions and toothy smile, that makes her so captivating to watch in all these roles. It’s precisely the way she wields these facial expressions, with a comical precision and offbeat charm, that allows her to reimagine herself entirely at will. As Roger Ebert wrote in 1980, Duvall “looks and sounds like almost nobody else… and has possibly played more really different kinds of characters than almost any other young actress of the 1970s.”

One last beauty moment stands out to me that’s worth mentioning, and it’s not just because the role won her a best actress award at Cannes in 1977. In Altman’s 3 Women, Duvall plays the awkward teen Millie, who works at a California spa for the elderly. Both surreal and eerie in its cinematography, Duvall’s performance is made more memorable through make-up, which feels as dreamlike as the film’s plot – who could possibly bat an eyelid at Duvall’s rust-tinted eyeshadow and blown-out bob standing out against Altman’s pastel scenery? It’s the sort of 70s glam that’s continued to grip beauty enthusiasts on TikTok – with Gen Z clips of the actor saying “Hello, I’m Shelley Duvall” spiced together with the original sound from her very own children’s anthology series, Faerie Tale Theatre. Take a look at some of her best beauty looks in the gallery above.