The complete cast of The Shining, the character each actor plays, and where they fit into the story. Written by Diane Johnson, Stanley Kubrick and directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Builds the performance on a startlingly fast slope — affable and slightly defensive in the interview, by the time he is alone with a typewriter he has already drifted somewhere the script never names. Nicholson's improvised 'Here's Johnny!' at the bathroom door is the most-quoted moment, but his quieter work in the Gold Room with the ghost bartender Lloyd is where the actor settles the question of whether the hotel is doing this to him or with him.
Delivers a performance that has been reappraised significantly since release — what reads early as a thin, anxious wife becomes, by the third act, a portrait of a woman whose nervous system has been organised around managing a violent husband. Duvall's discovery of the manuscript pages and her swing of the baseball bat on the staircase are the moments her Wendy stops performing the marriage and begins to author the escape.
Holds the centre of the film as a five-year-old without ever appearing to act in the conventional sense. Kubrick reportedly shielded the child from understanding the film was a horror movie, which gives Lloyd's reactions an unguarded quality the genre rarely captures. The Big Wheel rides through the corridor and the doubled-footprint solution in the maze are both performances that work because the actor does not know what the camera is trying to scare the audience with.
Gives the film its only adult outside the family who recognises what is happening and is willing to drive through a blizzard to do something about it. Crothers's pantry scene with Danny — patient, generous, careful in its naming of the gift — is the warmest sequence in the film and is also the device that lets Kubrick's later refusal of the rescue land as cruelly as it does.
Carries the opening tour, which is one of the most efficient pieces of expository writing in the script — the hotel's colonial backstory, the previous caretaker's axe murders, the closing-day procedures — without ever stepping out of the polite register of a hotel manager filling out a hire. Nelson's evenness in the scene is the device that makes the audience accept the job interview as a job interview rather than the opening of a haunting.
Appears mostly in the red bathroom of the Gold Room and is the film's quietest, most unsettling supernatural figure — a butler in formal wear who informs Jack, in the conversational register of a senior employee orienting a new hire, that he has 'always been the caretaker.' Stone's underplaying is the choice that lets the scene work; the threat is delivered as workplace mentorship.
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