8 Actors Who Were Scared Of Other Actors - Commenter Edition
7. Jack Nicholson (And Kubrick) Traumatised Shelley Duvall On The Shining
Who He Scared: Shelley Duvall (With a little help from Stanley Kubrick)
The filming of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining is the stuff of legend, but not because the movie was good. It was, at least, as far as most critics and viewers are concerned; it was legendary for a far less pleasant reason.
Kubrick may have been one of the greatest directors of all time, but he was a tyrant towards his actors. In The Shining, he set his sights on Shelly Duvall, and he truly did terrorize that woman by making her repeat takes more than a hundred times.
He also forced the other actors to alienate her and made her life a living hell. That's the director, so switching over to the actor in question, one Jack Nicholson, he didn't help Ms. Duvall through her arduous film shoot, and his devotion to the craft only pushed her further and further towards the edge of sanity.
Nicholson can be intimidating in any setting, but when he's been directed to strike fear in a co-star, he goes all out. In the scene where he crashes an axe through the bathroom door and says, "Here's Johnny," Duvall can be heard screaming for Jack to stop.
This could have been one of two things; since Jack was both Nicholson's first name as well as the name of his character, rumor has spread that she was actually pleading with her co-star to stop because he was truly scaring her. That shot required 60 doors and 12 hours of filming, which Duvall has described in the past:
"It was like some sort of primal scream therapy. Almost unbearable…But from other points of view, really very nice, I suppose…After the day was over and I’d cried for my 12 hours, I went home very contented. It had a very calming effect."