Shelley Duvall, the intrepid, Texas-born movie star whose wide-eyed, winsome presence was a mainstay in the films of Robert Altman and who co-starred in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” died Thursday. She was 75.

Duvall died in her sleep at her home in Blanco, Texas, her longtime partner, Dan Gilroy, announced. The cause was complications of diabetes, said her friend, the publicist Gary Springer.

Duvall was attending junior college in Texas when Altman’s crew members, preparing to film “Brewster McCloud,” encountered her as at a party in Houston in 1970. They introduced her to the director, who cast her in the movie and made her his protégé.

Duvall would go on to appear in many Altman films, like “Thieves Like Us,” “Nashville, “Popeye,” “Three Women” and “McCabe & Mrs. Miller.”

“He offers me damn good roles,” Duvall told The New York Times in 1977. “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.”

Duvall, gaunt and gawky, was no conventional Hollywood starlet. But she had a beguiling manner and exuded a singular naturalism.

Film critic Pauline Kael called her the “female Buster Keaton.”

At her peak, Duvall was a regular star in some of the defining movies of the 1970s and 1980s.

In “The Shining,” she played Wendy Torrance, who watches in horror as her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), goes crazy while their family is isolated in the Overlook Hotel. It was Duvall’s screaming face that made up half of the film’s most iconic image, along with Jack’s ax coming through the door.

Kubrick, a famous perfectionist, was notoriously hard on Duvall in making “The Shining.” His methods of pushing her through countless takes in the most anguished scenes took a toll on the actor. Some saw Kubrick’s treatment as bordering on torture; one scene was reportedly performed in 127 takes.

Duvall, in an interview in 1981 with People magazine, said she was crying “12 hours a day for weeks on end” during filming.

“I will never give that much again,” Duvall said. “If you want to get into pain and call it art, go ahead, but not with me.”

By the 1990s, she began retiring from acting and retreated from public life.

“How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime, they turn on you?” Duvall told The New York Times earlier this year. “You would never believe it unless it happens to you. That’s why you get hurt, because you can’t really believe it’s true.”

Duvall, the oldest of four, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on July 7, 1949. Her father, Robert, worked in law and her mother, Bobbie, in real estate.

Duvall married the artist Bernard Sampson in 1970. They divorced four years later. Duvall was in a long-term relationship with musician Paul Simon in the late ’70s after meeting during the making of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall.” She also dated Ringo Starr. During the making of the 1990 Disney Channel movie “Mother Goose Rock ’n’ Roll,” Duvall met Gilroy, of the group Breakfast Club, with whom she remained until her death.

Duvall moved back to Texas in the mid-1990s. Around 2002, after making the comedy “Manna FromHeaven,” she retreated from Hollywood. Her whereabouts became a topic for internet sleuths.

To those living in the Texas Hill Country, where Duvall lived for some 30 years, she was neither in hiding nor a recluse. But her circumstances were a mystery to the media and many of her Hollywood friends. She did a “Dr. Phil” interview in 2016.