RIP x 2
Shelley Duvall and Ruth Westheimer
Shelley Duvall had an over thirty-year career in television and film.
Duvall originally was interested in a career in science. Her acting career was serendipitous. She gave a party to promote her husband’s work and the director Robert Altman attended. He was quite taken by her and offered her a job even though she did not have any training. Altman liked offbeat casting.
She was in multiple seminal films in the 1970s and 1980s. Duvall was in The Shining and played Olive Oyl in the Robin Williams' Popeye film.
Shelley also was host and producer of Faerie Tale Theatre, an offbeat cable series. The series has an amazing number of well-known actors portraying familiar children's stories. She also was in Roxanne, an amusing Steve Martin film.
I saw a little bit of The Shining, a film version of the Stephen King book that has received some criticism. King himself didn’t like it, including how the script portrayed Duvall’s character. Others praised her performance. I never read the book though was interested after it was part of an amusing plot of Friends where Joey and Rachel (Little Women) read each other’s favorite book.
Duvall had a good experience with Altman, starring in multiple films, and enjoying the freedom and trust he had in her. Her experience with the director of The Shining was different. She later said she respected him but his exacting ways also made the shoot extremely difficult. He famously did an inordinate number of takes for different scenes and Duvall spoke of the experience as “excruciating.”
She later reportedly (physical and otherwise) had some issues, including an infamously bad interview with Dr. Phil.
Duvall recently had another role, perhaps open to more. NYT had a profile of her earlier this year. She is not related to Robert Duvall.
Ruth Westheimer, another person in the "she was still alive?" sweepstakes, died at 96. "Dr. Ruth" had a more interesting life than a "short woman with a funny accent that talked about sex."
Ruth was a Holocaust survivor, sent to Switzerland, while her family died in Germany. She was injured while trained as a sniper in Israel, injured by an exploding shell, but never killing anyone.
Karola Ruth Siegel was married twice before finding her true love with her third husband, giving her the now famous last name. She was named project director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Harlem in 1967, and she continued night studies until she received her doctorate in education.
A community affairs director of a NYC radio station heard her give a lecture on sexual literacy to broadcasters. The rest as they say is history.
In 2023, Dr. Westheimer was named New York State’s first honorary “ambassador to loneliness” by Gov. Kathy Hochul. In that position, which RW had proposed, Dr. Westheimer would “help New Yorkers of all ages address the growing issue of social isolation, which is associated with multiple physical and mental health issues."
Sexual literacy and positivity remain important issues today. Many states have attacked both.
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I noticed after I wrote a draft of this that Richard Simmons, famous for being a somewhat uncomfortable seeming fitness guru, has also died.
Also, after the final draft, I saw a report the much younger actress Shannen Doherty has also died. I stopped watching Charmed after she left the show.
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Alec Baldwin might have been involved in some situations where he came off as an asshole. Nonetheless, the repeated attempt to make the accident during the filming of Rust into a crime in respect to his involvement never seemed a credible idea.
So, it is not surprising that the latest attempt was dismissed with prejudice.