With the sad recent news that star Shelley Duvall has passed away just after turning 75, we’re looking back at a surprising late moment in her phenomenal career that occurred just two years ago. In 2022, her Golden Raspberry Award nomination for The Shining was officially rescinded. While the classic horror film, directed by Stanley Kubrick and based on the Stephen King story, is widely regarded as one of cinema’s all-time greatest movies, it was not met with the warmest reception when it was first released. In fact, Kubrick was nominated for Worst Director at the Razzies, with Duvall also nominated for Worst Actress. Those awards went to Robert Greenwald (Xanadu) and Brooke Shield (The Blue Lagoon) respectively, but the nominations have since garnered controversy.
It was Kubrick’s behavior and treatment of Duvall during the production of The Shining that ultimately led to the rescission. Kubrick’s torment of Duvall was notorious (and daughter Vivian Kubrick’s behind-the-scenes documentary for the film painstakingly portrays this). Speaking to Vulture, the founders of The Razzies (John J.B. Wilson and Maureen Murphy) said:
Knowing the backstory and the way that Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverized her, I would take that back… We’re willing to say, ‘Yeah, maybe that shouldn’t have been nominated.’ Everybody makes mistakes. That’s being human.
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Shelley Duvall, Acclaimed Star of The Shining, Dies Aged 75
Shelley Duvall, best known for starring in horror classic The Shining, has sadly passed away.
1980 was also the inaugural year of The Razzies, as they’ve come to be known. The pre-Oscars anti-award ceremony hurls awards at what they deem to be the worst movies of the year, and who were the worst directors, actors, and so on. Speaking to IndieWire, Wilson said this of the awards: “It’s not a slap in the face, it’s a banana peel on the floor.” He added:
It’s meant to be funny, and yeah, it takes people down a peg, but another thing I say a lot is, ‘If you got $20 million to do a crappy movie and you got a Razzie, you’ve still got $20 million — can you deal with it?’
The news about Duvall’s nomination came alongside the only other Razzies rescission, a special (and especially cruel) award category they created specifically for Bruce Willis. Four days after they announced the category, news came out that the actor was retiring after suffering from aphasia. The Golden Raspberry Awards removed the category.
The Razzies Stands by Stanley Kubrick’s Nomination
The Razzies did not, however, rescind their nomination for Stanley Kubrick, and the founders continue to dislike the director. “The voting membership the very first year were largely people that Maureen and I worked with at a trailer company,” Wilson said, continuing:
“A group of us who had read Stephen King’s novel went to see
The Shining
the night it opened at the Chinese, and we didn’t care for what Kubrick had done with the novel. The novel was far more visually astounding, far more terrifying, far more compelling, and we couldn’t understand why you would buy a novel that had all of that visual opportunity in it and then not do the topiary thing, not do the snakes in the carpet, not do the kids’ visions. If you’re going to say it’s ‘The Shining,’ you have to have certain key things in there that were not.”
Murphy added, “Exactly. I think that guy’s overrated. He did one good movie, and that was about it.” Of course, many cinephiles disagree with that, just as countless horror fans disagreed about Duvall’s Worst Actress nomination. The Shining is all about excess and overflow, and Duvall’s performance is a masterclass in uncontrollable terror and sadness. She will be missed.
