Adrienne Shelly

Actor/Director

Actress and director Adrienne Shelly (actress in Hal Hartley's "The Unbelievable Truth" and "Trust", among many others, and director of several independent films):

The following quotation is from the interview with Shelly at http://www.moviemaker.com/issues/20/shelly/20_shelly.html, "Suddenly Adrienne Shelly", by Tim Rhys:

MM: Are you religious in any way?

AS: I'm an optimistic agnostic. I'd like to believe. I'm willing to listen to any sort of evidence. I hope there's a God, I sure hope there is. I hope we don't just die and that's it. But there's a part of me that really needs some sort of scientific. There remains in my work, in my writing, an element of spirituality. But there are other moments when I feel profoundly insignificant. And that actually is a feeling that kind of frees me. A kind of feeling that this is it. This is my life, so I'd better enjoy it and I'd better be responsible. My father died when I was very young, and he died suddenly, without ever having been sick. So I've gone through life with this feeling that life could end at any given moment. When I wrote Sudden Manhattan and a writer friend said to me "Look, Adrienne, it's your first feature. It might take seven years to get produced." And I thought that is not acceptable to me. Because in my way of thinking I might not live another seven years.

-- submitted by Jim Lippard on 10-Feb-02

Shelley did not live another seven years--she was murdered in her NYC office by a construction contractor, Diego Pillco, on November 1, 2006, who tried to make it look by suicide by hanging. Her death was fictionalized into an episode of "Law and Order," "Melting Pot," which aired on February 16, 2007. Her last film, Waitress, was accepted into the 2007 Sundance Film Festival after her death.