Robert Duvall, the legendary character actor who specialized in portraying tough, complex men, died Sunday. He was 95 years old. Duvall’s wife Luciana confirmed the actor’s death in a statement on Duvall’s official Facebook page, writing that Duvall died “peacefully at home, surrounded by love and security.” A cause of death was not given.
Farewell words from his wife
“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller,” Luciana wrote. “To me, he was everything. His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love of characters, great food and lively conversation. For each of his many roles, Bob gave his all to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they embodied. In doing so, he leaves us all something lasting and unforgettable. Thank you for the years of support you have given Bob and for giving us this time and privacy to celebrate the memories he leaves behind.”
In a film career that began in the early 1960s, Duvall was a central figure in the New Hollywood of the 1970s, lending grit and soul to legendary works by directors such as George Lucas, Robert Altman and, most notably, Francis Ford Coppola. An Oscar winner who also proved to be an accomplished director – he received an Oscar nomination for his leading role in his excellent 1997 drama “The Apostle” – he brought a calming presence to films and developed into a warm, fatherly screen figure as he grew older.
But Duvall was also uncompromising, suffered no fools and was committed to his craft, even if it led to conflicts with filmmakers. “Directors say actors are difficult to work with – well, what about directors?” he once asked. “It’s our face that appears up there; it’s just her name.”
Early years and breakthrough
Robert Selden Duvall was born on January 5, 1931 and was raised by a father in the Navy. “We moved around a lot because we were a military family,” he recalled of his childhood. “We lived in San Diego and then in Annapolis, Maryland, at the Naval Academy. I remember seeing a ten-cent movie at Camp Pendleton when I was very young, in the 1930s when we lived in Mission Hills, San Diego.” After serving in the army himself, he studied acting in New York and became friends with contemporaries such as Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. “The feeling was that Bobby was the new Brando,” Hoffman later said. “I felt like he was the chosen one, and I probably wasn’t.”
After several years in the theater, Duvall got his break in film when he was cast as the friendly, misunderstood outsider Boo Radley in the Academy Award-winning 1962 film adaptation of “To Kill a Nightingale.” (Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay based on the Harper Lee novel, and his wife had seen Duvall in a stage production about a year earlier; when casting for the film began, they suggested the relative unknown.) From then on, he continued to collect supporting roles, including in 1969’s “The Rain People,” a film by a young director named Francis Ford Coppola.
Rise in the seventies
In the following decade, Duvall rose to greater prominence, first as the grumpy Major Frank Burns in the 1970 anti-war comedy MAS*H, a reunion with Robert Altman, who had previously cast him in 1967’s Countdown. A year later, he was the endangered everyman in George Lucas’s minimalist dystopian sci-fi drama THX 1138, before starring in The Godfather, where he worked alongside his idol Marlon Brando. They previously appeared together in the Arthur Penn drama The Chase, but The Godfather gave Duvall the opportunity to spend more time with the revered actor.
His co-star James Caan “made a joke, and it took Brando three seconds to understand it,” Duvall recalled. “He was like the Godfather of actors. Dustin Hoffman, me and Gene Hackman went to Cromwell’s Drugstore in New York City a few times a week. And if we mentioned Marlon once, we mentioned him 25 times.”
Duvall had a Brando-like intensity in the ’70s, whether as the coolly strategic Tom Hagen in The Godfather films or as Frank Hackett, the soulless, hot-headed executive in Sidney Lumet’s biting satire Network. He could have played the lead in Jaws, but declined. “I wanted to play the other role that the guy from England played, Robert Shaw, but I was too young,” he admitted, later adding: “But I don’t regret turning down the role or the lead role because I like character roles more.”
Oscar nominations and defining roles
He received his first Oscar nomination for “The Godfather,” and his second for the role of Kilgore, the surf-loving, napalm-loving lieutenant colonel in “Apocalypse Now.” The character was intended as a critique of American hawkishness in Vietnam, but Duvall, himself a military veteran, wanted to make sure he got it right. “The role was oversubscribed,” he recalled. “It was a guy like a cowboy with boots on. And it was a caricature. … So I talked to a guy who had been in Vietnam and he told me how to design it with the Air Cavalry because I had served in the Army and knew what special duty officers were like. We developed it and shaped it from there.”
Duvall wasn’t afraid to show the dark side of military service: He received his first Best Actor nomination for playing the abusive, tormented fighter pilot in “The Great Santini” who is unable to adapt to a life away from active duty. Three years later, he won the Academy Award as Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer looking for a second chance in “Tender Mercies.” It was a reunion with Foote, whose original screenplay also won an Oscar, and the film featured Duvall in one of his most sensitive performances, as a difficult man discovering his vulnerability.
But Duvall was never one to seek sentimentality. In a 1991 interview, he said: “When you watch documentaries, people are always trying to contain their emotions, to fight against what’s there. That’s much more interesting. If you fight against it, the colors come out. It’s a discipline. If you don’t cry, you’ll be rewarded, something else will emerge, something beautiful.”
Late career and attitude to acting
In the decades that followed, he cemented his status as a consummate character actor, bringing integrity and weathered dignity to films like “The Natural” and “Days of Thunder.” He played father figures, grumpy editors-in-chief and various law enforcement representatives. Regardless of the role, this toughness was always present, the desire to fight against the artificiality of acting in order to achieve something true and lived in his characters. Duvall directed four films, the best of which was The Apostle, a film about faith and redemption that he also wrote and financed.
He cast himself as Sonny, a violent Pentecostal preacher who, after beating his wife’s lover into a coma, leaves town to start a new life in a new community. It’s one of his most powerful, nuanced performances, and highlights the paucity of adventurous, idiosyncratic roles for serious actors in Hollywood after the 1970s heyday.
“An actor is always looking for a challenge, and this was a wonderful challenge, something I felt I could do,” Duvall said of “The Apostle.” “I’m not saying other actors couldn’t do it, but I felt like I had a feel for this man. It was very challenging, in a stimulating, vivid way. I wanted to see if I could recreate the rhythms, the temperament, the whole texture and aura of this man. … I didn’t want to accuse or criticize these people – I wanted something from their perspective.”
Belated honors and blunt candor
Duvall received two more Oscar nominations throughout his career – as a lawyer representing a polluting company in “A Civil Action” and as an aging judge in “The Judge” – but was also celebrated for championing younger talent, such as co-starring in Billy Bob Thornton’s breakout independent film “Sling Blade.” A new generation of filmmakers like James Gray and Steve McQueen cast him, appreciating his connection to a glorious period of American acting. And although colleagues like Hackman eventually withdrew, Duvall continued to work. Nevertheless, he knew that the day would come for him when he would have to leave acting behind.
“I don’t know what’s left,” he told a journalist in 2014. “There will be a few more things, I don’t know. If they keep sending me worthwhile offers. Then at some point it will expire. So retirement will come. Part of the evolution, of course for you. It will expire.”
“So it’s basically a game.”
In addition to his Oscars, he received an Emmy, a BAFTA and three Independent Spirit Awards. His starring role in the 1989 western miniseries “Lonesome Dove” is as popular as many of his revered film roles. And he never stopped voicing his opinions, criticizing filmmakers who he felt weren’t good with actors – he declared that Stanley Kubrick’s films contained “the worst performances I’ve ever seen in cinema” – and famously refused to appear in The Godfather: Part III because he claimed his old friend Coppola had given him too low an offer. (“There are two or three other actors in this film who should be making more than I was offered,” he said at the time. “That’s just not right. You know how stingy they are.”)
But this blunt honesty fueled the succinct poetry of his play and reinforced the impression that his characters were completely authentic, said what they felt and would not be swayed in their convictions. Duvall was never anything other than completely real, never believing he was transforming himself for his roles. He was himself.
“It’s like a role-playing game,” he once said about his job. “Kids play father, mother, child, right? We play father, mother, child as adults. We get paid good money to play father, mother, child. So it’s basically a game. You become the character, but actually you turn yourself in a certain direction, as if you’ve become the character. But you can never lose sight of who and what you are. You have a set of emotions, a psyche, a soul, and you don’t become something else. It’s all these things that are transformed into something, that seems different.”
