SHELLEY’S NIGHTMARE ROLE

The actress who died Thursday of diabetes at 75 never got over being directed by Stanley Kubrick in the 1980 psycho thriller ‘The Shining.’

It was a living nightmare, she said.

“Stanley Kubrick doesn’t print anything until at least the 35th take,” she said in an interview some years ago. “Thirty-five takes, running and crying and carrying a little boy, it gets hard.” 

With perfectionist Kubrick in charge, the 17-week shoot ran way over schedule to almost a year as Kubrick kept shooting take after take. He made Shelley redo the scne where her character Wendy swings a baseball bat at Jack Nicholson a record-breaking 127 times.

Kubrick worked well with Jack, but was “notoriously brutal” on Shelley.

“Stanley pushed and prodded me further than I’ve ever been pushed before,” she said. “Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable.”

ANGRY EXCHANGE BETWEEN KUBRICK AND SHELLEY—

“After a while, your body rebels,” Shelley said. “It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry.”

JACK NICHOLSON ADMIRED HER GRIT

“To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day, I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ “

In other roles she fared better. They include Robert Altman’s movies “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville,” “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”and “3 Women.”

“He offers me damn good roles,” Shelley said of Altman who died in 2006. “None of them have been alike. He has a great confidence in me, and a trust and respect for me, and he doesn’t put any restrictions on me or intimidate me, and I love him,” she said in an interview with the New York Times in 1977.

Shelley was also in 1977’s “Annie Hall” directed by Woody Allen.

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