Spacek and Duvall in the 1970s

“One of the most engagingly disengaged actors to ever haunt the screen,” wrote Michael Koresky in 2011, “Duvall often seems as though she’s walking through a fog. Her gawky-elegant string-bean body moving as though on a conveyer belt, her perpetually goggling saucer eyes staring out at the world yet seeming to take nothing back in.” Two Women: Early Films of Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, a nine-film series running from Friday through next Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will open with the one feature starring both of them, Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977).

As Patricia Resnick, who wrote the treatment, once explained to Sam Wasson, 3 Women came to Altman in a dream, and it was “mostly cast and setting, more than it was story. Sissy and Shelley were in the dream. And he had the desert and something about switching personas. Those things were there, but they were vague. It was a dream.”

Duvall came close to single-handedly creating her character, Millie Lammoreaux, a nurse at a health spa for the elderly. “She wrote those diary entries, and all that stuff about shopping and cooking was hers too,” says Resnick. Millie is “unconsciously engulfed by her own pathological narcissism,” writes artist Eric White, “and is so deeply committed to the fantasy in which she exists that she is oblivious to people’s indifference toward her. Pinky Rose—in Spacek’s words, ‘the impish eternal child’—seeks salvation in Millie, at one point declaring, ‘You’re the most perfect person I ever met.’”

Pinky’s obsession with Millie evolves into something ominous. When Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging) included 3 Women in her Criterion Top 10, she noted that Spacek is “able to go from completely naturalistic to totally surreal . . . and still hold her character—it’s amazing.” Spacek by this point was the bigger star. She’d just landed her first Oscar nomination for her performance as a bullied sixteen-year-old on the verge of discovering her telekinetic powers in Carrie, and it’s telling that Duvall’s box-office breakthrough would come a few years later in another horror movie, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).

One myth that Duvall has seemed eager to debunk over the years is the presumption that Kubrick broke her during the arduous thirteen-month-long shoot. Yes, she had to cry and scream for hours on end through take after take as Jack Nicholson’s writer-gone-berserk chases her down with a baseball bat or an axe. “Almost unbearable,” she told Roger Ebert at the end of 1980. “But from other points of view, really very nice, I suppose.”

Both Seth Abramovitch, who profiled Duvall for the Hollywood Reporter in 2021, and Saskia Solomon, who also found her toodling around the Texas Hill Country in her Toyota 4Runner when she spoke with her for the New York Times earlier this year, discovered that—despite an infamous bout with mental instability during a 2016 Dr. Phil interview—she is lucid and proud of her work as both an actor, and in the 1980s and early ’90s, a producer of imaginative children’s television programs.

Talking to Solomon about Duvall in The Shining, Nathan Abrams, the author or coauthor of a good handful of books on Kubrick, says, “You forget that she’s acting. It’s a fantastic performance. Shelley goes through a range of emotions: loving mother, doting wife, and then that scared partner. I think Kubrick clearly saw that ability in that range, and then coached that performance out of her.”

Immediately after The Shining, Duvall returned to Altman to take on the role that, as more than a few reviewers have noted, she was practically born to play, Olive Oyl opposite Robin Williams’s Popeye in a musical based on the comic strip written by Jules Feiffer with songs by Harry Nilsson. Popeye (1980) was a hit with audiences but not with critics—at least initially. “Reputation be damned,” wrote Sean Burns in 2015, Popeye is “a wonderful movie, beguiling and deeply strange.” One fan, Paul Thomas Anderson, included Duvall’s rendition of “He Needs Me” in Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

Altman was already shooting Brewster McCloud (1970) in Houston when he met Duvall at a party and urged her to join the cast. But she was still studying and turned him down. Altman and his team persisted. “I got tired of arguing, and thought maybe I am an actress,” she recalled in 1977. “They told me to come. I simply got on a plane and did it. I was swept away.”

BAM will also screen Altman’s Thieves Like Us (1974), an adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel that Nicholas Ray had shot as They Live by Night in 1948. Keith Carradine plays Bowie, a convicted murderer and bank robber who falls for Duvall’s Keechie. Altman’s “account of Coca-Cola-swigging young lovers in the ’30s is the most quietly poetic of his films,” wrote Pauline Kael.

In her first notable role, Spacek, too, played a lover on the run. Loosely based on the 1958 murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, Badlands (1973), the first feature directed by Terrence Malick, stars Martin Sheen as Kit and Spacek as fifteen-year-old, baton-twirling Holly, who narrates their story with barely a hint of emotion.

“One of the glories of Badlands, brightening over time, is the absolute rightness of the casting,” wrote Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime) in 2013. “Neither actor had shouldered a leading role before; they look endearingly young, and everything about their movements and mannerisms—her shyness and his pretended confidence—feels perfectly calibrated, as a great deal of the film’s unsettling power derives from the characters’ sustained earnestness and charm.”

BAM returns to Altman territory with Welcome to L.A. (1976), an ensemble film Altman produced with protégé Alan Rudolph directing and Spacek halfway down the call sheet, playing a housemaid who becomes involved with a cluster of wealthy Angelenos. This “variation on La ronde is bed-happy and behaviorally tone-deaf,” wrote Newcity’s Ray Pride last summer, “but the characters lean on privileged moments and the lustrous and trashy Los Angeles of its moment as captured by David Myers provides a bittersweet time capsule.”

Spacek wrapped the 1970s and launched a new phase in her illustrious career with a genuine triumph, playing country music star Loretta Lynn in Michael Apted’s Cold Miner’s Daughter (1980). Based on the singer’s memoir, the film “takes the basic material (rags to riches, overnight success, the onstage breakdown, and, of course, the big comeback) and relates them in wonderfully human terms,” wrote Roger Ebert. “It’s fresh and immediate. That is due most of all to the performance by Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn. With the same sort of magical chemistry she’s shown before, when she played the high school kid in Carrie, Spacek at twenty-nine has the ability to appear to be almost any age onscreen.”

Spacek has been nominated for a total of six Oscars. This is the one she won.