Actors Who Never Recovered From Their Most Distressing Roles

For weeks, Kubrick pushed Duvall to the brink of sanity. Duvall was forced to cry so often and for such great lengths of time that she had to keep a water bottle nearby to stay hydrated. Her hair was falling out in clumps. Still, Kubrick didn't care—he made Duvall perform a record-setting 127 takes of the baseball bat scene. Duvall's co-star Jack Nicholson credited her with "the toughest job that any actor I've seen had, because forty percent of that movie, she's hysterical," but he believed that perhaps there was a method to Kubrick's madness.

"He beat Shelley into that performance," Nicholson said. "If that was me, I don't know what I would do. I do not. I still wonder. You're supposed to be able to do it, but for four months? But she did. She's brilliant in the movie."

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The More You Know

  • The Lion King was originally known as King of the Jungle until someone at Disney finally remembered that lions don’t actually live in jungles.
  • Stanley Kubrick had all the sets and models from the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey destroyed to prevent a sequel from being made.
  • Hattie McDaniels was the first Black actor to win an Oscar
  • While filming ‘The Machinist,’ Christian Bale only ate an apple and a can of tuna each day. His goal was to weigh 100 pounds before producers stopped him.
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