10 Actors Who Broke Down On The Set Of Famous Movies

2. Stanley Kubrick Drives Shelley Duvall To The Edge Of Sanity; She Presents Him With Hairs That Have Fallen Out During Filming - The Shining

The Shining Stanley Kubrick Shelley Duvall
Warner Bros. Pictures

Making a movie with an renowned perfectionist like Stanley Kubrick - and a cold, emotionless perfectionist at that - was never going to be an easy task, but Shelley Duvall, who plays Wendy Torrance in the horror classic, presumably did not expect her director to be quite as antagonising as he ultimately was: Kubrick near-on sent the poor woman insane.

One could argue that Kubrick set out to do so to enhance her performance, but still... Duvall, not surprisingly, was reduced to tears on a number of occassions during filming, but it's a tribute to her spirit as both a human being and as an actress that she didn't quit production or give up - even when, on the verge of some kind of break down, she presented a mass of hairs to Kubrick that had fallen out over the course of filming.

In true Kubrickian style, he ignored the situation entirely, and even told the crew not to sympathise with her. Ouch.

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