In this September 1998 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Shelley Duvall sits down in the Toronto studio four years before she would stop acting for two decades. She arrives as Wendy from The Shining and Olive Oyl from Popeye, with The Portrait of a Lady recently behind her — and almost nothing in the hour is about what was done to her. Every story she tells is about something she made happen.
That includes the one thing she built from scratch. She explains where Faerie Tale Theatre came from, and the answer is a paperback she happened to pack for the Popeye shoot on the island of Malta. From there she describes getting Robin Williams involved, and casting Teri Garr as the nasty princess — a producer’s account of a producer’s decisions, offered by an actress the industry preferred to talk about as a muse. She also detours, cheerfully, into software that can tell when you are lying.
Then she goes back to being seven years old, freezing on stage at a school talent show and quitting it, and what she overheard her parents say through her bedroom door that night. It is the hinge of the interview. A few minutes later Petty stops and tells her, directly, that she is amazing. Duvall cannot accept it. She goes on to describe how Robert Altman found her in 1970 and the fact that she never had a single day of acting training, as though both were accidents that happened to someone else.
Shelley Duvall died on July 11, 2024. Unseen since it was first broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show, safeguarding a long-form conversation in which she speaks for herself about a career she largely engineered.
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