His grief narrowed into tunnel vision, Ostroy pleaded with the detective's office to investigate Shelly's death as a murder. Ostroy refused to believe Shelly had committed suicide in the final days of her life, she'd been radiant with happiness, perhaps for one of the first times since her childhood, chiefly due to her young daughter, Sophie. On November 1, 2006, she was found dead in the shower of her West Village office, discovered there by her husband after she'd gone hours without answering his calls. Shelly orchestrated the spectacle, but lived to see none of the flash.
The story became a Sundance darling and, eventually, a smash-hit Broadway musical starring Sara Bareilles. Such is an unusual concoction for a romantic comedy, and yet, even years after the first time I watched Waitress in a drafty hotel room, I can't remember a film that made me feel so warm. Jenna is flanked throughout the film by her two best friends and fellow waitresses, Becky (Cheryl Hines) and Dawn (Shelly), each with their own oddball traumas. Today, Shelly is perhaps most applauded for her work writing, directing and acting in the Keri Russell-led Waitress, in which Russell's Jenna, a waitress at a Southern diner, discovers she's pregnant with her abusive husband's baby and starts an affair with her OBGYN. The actress who'd adorned magazine covers in the wake of her films Trust, The Unbelievable Truth, and Serious Moonlight is the subject of Ostroy's new HBO documentary, Adrienne, a heart-wrenching eulogy in film form. “She was just this sweet little Jewish girl from Long Island,” Ostroy says. Even now, he struggles to describe what he first noticed about her it wasn't that she was an indie film ingénue or a stunning strawberry blonde who stood all of 5’1”. “I had never met anybody like her,” says her husband, Andy Ostroy, 15 years after her unfathomable death. She was a little quirky, intrinsically bold, an artist shaped and haunted by the pursuit of joy.
They called her a “unicorn.” Those who loved her best say Adrienne Levine, known by the stage name Adrienne Shelly, had the sort of Hollywood magnetism that borders on mythical.