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“One quick look at her bio will tell the story,” wrote a reviewer back in 2014. “She had it all, everything—Shelley Duvall was one horse on which any smart player would bet.” Until she went off track …
Like our last subject, Tart for Trump Harley Lane, the Popeye paramour is from Texas … but sad to state, is now a Lone Star.
“The Shining Star Shelley Duvall Looks Unrecognizable, Reveals Mental Illness on Dr. Phil: ‘I’m Very Sick,’” headlined Entertainment Tonight just days ago.
As the Daily Mail elaborated: “Her doe eyes filled with fear as Jack Nicholson chops his way through a door remains one of Hollywood horror movies most iconic scenes …
… but this star is a heartbreakingly long way from her glory days. In a sneak peek of Friday’s Dr. Phil show the 67-year-old actress {you’d think someone born on 7/7 would be lucky … but the ’49 adds up to 13}, who rose to fame in the Eighties, looks almost unrecognizable.” Yet Sleuth still sees glimmers of the smiling Shell shining through:
“If Jack Nicholson was born to play The Joker {in Batman},” began a two-page tribute to her in just Sleuth’s twelfth ever issue {in 1989}, “then surely Shelley was propagated to portray Olive Oyl!” Which she did, to acclaim and fame, in the 1980 live-action film Popeye … and later dual-signed a still for the Sleuth Collection with onscreen love Robin Williams.
And likely her lover off screen as well—she was his frequent datemate at the time …
… and years later at a film tribute to Williams, the eccentric actor turned away from his mamnificent Moscow on theHudson co-star Maria Conchita Alonso …
… to bury his face in Duvall’s diminutive décolletage.
“I loved Robin Williams,” Shelley says to Dr. Phil McGraw in one of her more disturbing declarations in the provocative preview clip:
“I don’t think he is dead.” Asked by the TV psychiatrist where she thinks Williams is now, the actress asserts: “Shape shifting.”
Which is something Duvall did when playing Olive Oyl: “That was such a physical ordeal, making Popeye,” she sighed in a 1980 interview with the great Roger Ebert. “I had to crane my body and neck out of place like the drawings in the funny papers until I dislocated it!” {all autographs from the Sleuth treasure trove}.
“Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive and breathes her own spirit into it,” raved legendary critic Pauline Kael. “Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with”—looking like this lurid underground cartoon of Ms. Oyl in all ways … but two.
“It was real treat for me to play Olive Oyl. I loved her,” Shelley smiled just after. “Now don’t laugh: Although Olive Oyl is a cartoon character, I think she does have depth.” Which was plunged into by both Wimpy and pal Popeye in this titular 1930s underground Tijuana Bible—pornographic pamphlets also called ‘8 pagers’ for their length:
Sleuth recently auctioned his rare original.
Despite her lanky looks, the character of Olive has always been viewed as a sex object—indeed the “coy flapper” came a full decade before Popeye was added to the comic strip Thimble Theatre in 1929.
And indeed nearly nine decades later, she remains an erotic presence in modern mainstream cartoons.
Asked by her girlfriends in the film to explain her amour’s appeal, Shelley sings simply “He’s Large.” And Olive still oyls his crank in many memes and Internet insertions today!
“Olive Oyl is 101 percent woman!” Duvall declared to Ebert. “She’s not Popeye’s ‘girlfriend’ … I see her as a real femme fatale.” And as fate would have it, their dark nips and trimmed lips appear nearly ’eye•dentical!
A rude nude Shelley was only too happy to sign for Sleuth.
“Hers is not the face or form we came to expect of a movie star back in the opulent era,” marveled Newsweek. “Still, it is the toothsome and virtually bosomless Shelley Duvall who has blossomed into a film favorite.”
Born in Houston and named for Frankenstein authoress Mary Shelley—how’s that as a harbinger of her horror heights and latest lows?—the future star of 1984’s Frankenweenie “had never for a moment intended to be an actress.”
“Just a typical spacy hippie chick (below left),” stoner Shelley recalled, “I’d given a party for my boyfriend Bernard {Sampson, below right} at his parents’ house, and he was a painter” {they wed in 1970, divorced in ’74}.
Director Robert Altman’s assistants Brian McKay and Tommy Thompson were art lovers … and approached the hesitant hostess with an offer. “In the beginning, I though Brian and Tommy were narcs,” giggled Duvall. “I mean, it was a real swinging party. Our friends were all smoking in the playroom.”
“They said they wanted me for a movie, but at first I thought they meant a nudie flick, some kind of porno, since an awful lot of nudies are made in Houston.”
What they wanted her for was Brewster McCloud—filmed on location at the Astrodome—where owlish Bud Cort dreams of becoming a bird … but is warned by fairy godmother {Sally Kellerman, Altman’s muse from M*A*S*H} “against having sexual intercourse,” in the words of Wikipedia’s plot synopsis, “as this could kill his instinct to fly. He eventually drives her away—and dooms himself—when he ignores her advice about sex by hooking up with Astrodome usher Suzanne (Shelley Duvall).”
The shy 20-year-old salesgirl from Foley’s clothing store (below left) was tailor made to play the wide-eyed worker (below right).
Heading to Hollywood despite “never having left Texas,” Shelley won the part … and the thrice-married director’s heart. “Altman was so fascinated by her performance,” according to IMDb, “that she appeared in six of his next films” … as well as on his arm—and in his apartment overlooking Cannes.
“Bob won my trust right at the beginning,” she enthused. “He’s the most imaginative man I’ve ever met.”
And he helped Brewster viewers imagine what it was like to watch Duvall’s derrière disrobe for bed …
… as she led mild-mannered McCloud through his first sexperience.
“Even when she copped Brewster’s cherry,” noted a smitten scribe, “her horniness was pure and natural, without even a hint of lasciviousness.”
That was left to latter-day hornmen, who less than two years ago debated on gun-lovers’ AR15.com forum “…if young Shelley was bang-able or not?” Specifically singling out her Brewster keister de•butt, one member decided “…indubitably. Very fuckable there.”
Yet it was another bedroom scene—7 years later and only involving oral intercourse—that is maybe her most memorable: as a rock journalist nympho who forces Woody Allen to suffer a severe case of labial lockjaw in AnnieHall (1977).
“I hope you don’t mind that I took so long to finish,” smoking Shelley says as Woody loses his after hours of continual cunnilingus. “No, don’t be silly,” he sighs. “I’m starting to get some feeling back in my jaw now.”
Nipples clearly aroused and soul satisfied, Duvall declares: “Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience” …
… an homage to the “nightmarishly complex, bizarre or illogical” qualities of the Czech writer’s prose.” That apparently can curl her toes.
“Um, thank you,” the exhausted Allen remarks, rubbing his glassy eyes.
And to think Popeye would only eat spinach!
Today Shelley is also exhausted … because her “bizarre” and “illogical” mind tragically thinks she’s under constant surveillance … by the Sheriff of Nottingham!
Sadly, he’s also recently deceased {acid-tonguedAlan Rickman, 17 months after her reliable Robin}.
And it was another robbin’ hood {sorry} who stole her heart … and fostered her first and only nude scene … in 1974’s Thieves Like Us—when she tries to come clean by bathing bare-breasted in front of bank criminal Keith Carradine.
“Yes, she’s thin,” notes a reviewer at Mr. Skin’s Celebrity Nude Database (www.cndb.com) of the soaking scene, “but she has a great butt, and I like her small, sweet, tight breasts.” Scrub one out, below.
“It took a lot of guts to do this in the ’70s age of {bosom queens} Chesty Morgan, Uschi Digart, Pam Grier and Kitten Natividad.”
Following our heroine’s bare bath …
… her boyfriend is killed by the Texas Rangers in a shootout reminiscent of Bonnie and Clyde. Butt Shelley’s character “carries on, pregnant with his baby” …
… a departure from its origin 1937 novel Thieves Like Us, in which she too “meets a violent END.”
“I might get killed, but I wouldn’t die,” the actress alluded to her future fantasies while at the apex of her career. “I’d be born again as another me—or a lampshade, but I’ll be on Earth—always. I believe in everything and everybody existing forever and on and on in the same form or other forms.”
We’ll shed light on this lithe Lampshade’s other forms in our second scheduled session …
