Shelley Duvall was the ultimate film star

I still remember the first insult I ever received about my appearance. A boy in my primary school told me that my eyes were too big for my face. My mother comforted me by telling me he was only jealous. Jealous of what I wasn’t sure. My eyes didn’t even work particularly well, despite their enormous size. When I was five, I had to have an operation on one and wore a patch for a while. It was unfair and disappointing. How could I become everything I wanted to be as an adult — beautiful, adored, loved, feared — when I was already damned?

Around the same time, my sister and I were surreptitiously watching a lot of horror films. We made our way through all the classics, then the sequels, then the terrible ones (A Nightmare on Elm Street 5). We thought they were mad, terrifying and brilliant. One night we watched The Shining, and Shelley Duvall’s cartoonishly large features appeared on the screen. Here was a woman with huge eyes, eyes that only seemed to grow rounder the more terrified she became. I was transfixed. My wide-set brown eyes met hers. She was more vivid and real than any other actress I’d ever seen.

I may be alone in feeling that watching The Shining was one of the most comforting experiences of my childhood. Duvall wasn’t classically beautiful — she didn’t register as beautiful at all to me at that age — but she was unusual, interesting, different. I grew up in a small town, and, from then on, I revolted against what I saw as narrowness of thinking. Here, I knew Duvall would be described as “ugly” or, if we were feeling collectively generous, “unfortunate-looking”. But beauty was never her intention or her project.

Even now, my favourite thing about her is how she defies categorisation. You couldn’t describe her with one single word. You wouldn’t try any corny old chat-up lines on her. She’s too eccentric; otherworldly; unsettling. But you’d fall in love with her across the room. You’d fall in love with her ethereal face, her obvious charisma.

A talent scout for Robert Altman famously discovered her at a party in Texas, and the director then cast her as Suzanne in Brewster McCloud. And while she’s best known for her role in The Shining, I love her as Millie Lammoreaux, the fanciful, colour-co-ordinated, desperately feminine care-home assistant in Altman’s mysterious Three Women. As Millie, she is both assured and deluded: deeply convinced that men can’t resist her even as they show no interest, repeating dinner recipes to bored audiences. Millie has no idea who she is. Her personality is cobbled together from women’s magazines. Duvall, her doe eyes uncertain, expertly portrays a woman clinging to a persona she’s crafted. She’s a master at playing characters who act happy when they’re sad, their daffiness masking depth.

Duvall was also a gifted comic performer, often risking silliness and goofiness. She steals the show as the “transplendent” Pam, the Rolling Stone journalist, in Annie Hall. But Altman knew her best and cast her best. Even in a cast as huge and varied as his American opus Nashville, Duvall shines as Martha, a girl who can’t resist a male musician.

The pleasure that comes from watching Duvall is largely to do with how unpolished she is (she was initially reluctant to get into acting). Now, as movie stars increasingly fit the same smooth mould, this naivety and spontaneity seem incredibly rare. I’ll always remember the gift she gave me as a child: a face I’d never seen before. At 74, after a 20-year hiatus, she returned to America’s screens earlier this year in werewolf film The Forest Hills. Has her magic remained intact? Of course it has.

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