One of the scariest movies of all time damaged Shelley Duvall's psyche: what she experienced on the set of The Shining

Actors often resort to the most horrific experiments to get into character, and Shelley Duvall, the star of one of the scariest films of all time, The Shining, is no exception. In the name of art, director Stanley Kubrick treated the actress somewhat cruelly to convey realistic horror on camera.

The actress considers the role of Wendy Torrance to be the most difficult in her film career. She confessed to The Mirror that from the first day on set, Kubrick deliberately forced the entire cast to avoid communicating with Duvall and not sympathize with her for her failures. The director constantly kept the woman under stress, which almost immediately had a great impact on her health: her hair began to fall out during filming, and later she became hysterical because of the amount of effort she put in, which was never noticed by film critics.

One of the most famous scenes, where Wendy runs away from Jack with a baseball bat, was reshoot 127 times. The actress couldn't get her emotions right for the perfectionist director, which exhausted her and made her cry for hours during filming.

"We shot this for about three weeks. Every day. It was very hard. Jack was so good, so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this," the actress commented to The Hollywood Reporter on the legendary scene with her escape from Jack Torrance.

Another legendary moment that "killed" Duvall was the shot where Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance was knocking out the white bathroom door with an axe. At the time, 60 of them were used.

Duvall herself justifies the director, "He's got that streak. He definitely has it. But I think it's mainly because people have treated him that way in the past. He was very warm and friendly to me. He spent a lot of time with me and Jack. He just wanted to sit and talk for hours while the team was waiting."

Due to health problems caused by stress and a series of subsequent not-so-successful films, the actress decided that she would quit her career in 2002. In particular, her family needed her at the time as her brother had spinal cancer.

Interestingly, Stephen King, the author of the horror book The Shining, on the basis of which Kubrick made the legendary film, was dissatisfied with the abuse of the lead actress and the maximum discrepancy between the director's version and the original novel.

"It's so misogynistic. I mean, Wendy Torrence is just presented as a screaming dishrag," King told Rolling Stone.

And the writer can be understood because the film has many inaccuracies and lost important moments, starting with the color of Wendy Torrence's hair (originally blonde) and ending with the scene of escape from the murderous Overlook Hotel.

At the age of 74, Shelley Duvall is returning to acting after a long 22-year retirement. The woman starred in the horror film The Forest Hills, in which the star from The Shininh is barely recognizable. In a conversation with People, she notes, "It's so much fun to act again. It enriches your life."

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