Iconic ‘The Shining’ Photograph Is Traced Back to a Real-Life 1921 Valentine’s Day Dance in London

The legendary group photo “proving” that Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance never really left the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining” has been finally found in real life, 45 years later.

Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film was released in 1980, with Nicholson and Shelley Duvall playing two parents who relocate to a remote resort to look after the empty property during its offseason. As struggling author Jack descends into madness, the blood-soaked past of the Overlook Hotel infiltrates his tenuous understanding of the present. The final sequence in which the audience sees Jack in one of the old photographs at the Overlook is one of the most famous scenes of the film.

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Now, New York Times reporter Aric Toler has sourced where the photo exactly was from, and who was really in it. Toler wrote in a thread on X that he worked with retired British academic Alasdair Spark for almost a year to solve the “mystery” of the picture, wondering “where did the original photo from the end of ‘The Shining’ come from, and where/when was it captured?”

Toler discovered that the original photo was taken from the BBC Hulton Archive, which was later purchased by Getty Images. Murray Close, a photographer who worked on “The Shining,” confirmed to Toler that this is where the image was taken from, with Nicholson’s face being “pasted on” on the body of famous jazz dance instructor Santos Casani. The photo itself is from a Valentine’s dance on February 14, 1921 at the Empress Ballroom in the Royal Palace Hotel in London.

“The Shining” fans can recreate the image, in part, by visiting The Stanley Hotel, the real Colorado resort that inspired Kubrick. The resort was transformed into an immersive horror experience in 2024 from Peacock and Blumhouse. Producer Jason Blum is set to curate an ongoing horror cinema exhibit housed within the hotel in partnership with the Colorado Office of Film, Television, and Media.

The making of “The Shining” on location was also captured in 2024 documentary “Shine On — The Forgotten ‘Shining’ Location,” as produced in partnership with the Stanley Kubrick Film Archive and the late auteur’s estate.

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