Actor and filmmaker Robert Duvall has died. Duvall had a prestigious career with roles in some of the most popular and respected films ever made.
According to The Guardian, Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931 and he attended Principia College, a Christian Scientist school in Illinois, before serving in the army and then studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. While he was a struggling actor, Duvall shared an apartment with Dustin Hoffman.
Duvall’s early acting work was in television and he appeared in Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Naked City, The Fugitive, and The Twilight Zone. His first film role was in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird in which he played Boo Radley. That was followed by parts in Bullitt, The Chase, and The Rain People.
Duvall’s career took off in the 1970s and he had roles in M*A*S*H*, The Godfather, Network, The Eagle Has Landed, and Apocalypse Now. His career spanned over sixty years with parts in The Natural, Colors, Days of Thunder, Newsies, Lonesome Dove, Thank You for Smoking, and The Judge. He was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning Best Actor for Tender Mercies. Duvall also directed the documentary We’re Not the Jet Set and the features Angelo My Love, The Apostle, Assassination Tango, and Wild Horses.
Robert Duvall was a key actor of 1970s cinema. He succeeded in part because he was a very skilled actor but also, as is often the case in the arts, he was at the right place at the right time and connected with the right people. In the late 1960s, Hollywood films embraced a broader idea of what a leading actor could look like which allowed people like Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman to become movie stars. Duvall worked with some of the key filmmakers of the 1970s. He was in Arther Penn’s The Chase, he had the lead role in George Lucas’ first feature, THX-1138 and he played a key role in Sidney Lumet’s Network. Duvall did several films with Robert Altman, starting with 1967’s Countdown, a drama about the space race. Altman and Duvall collaborated again on 1970’s M*A*S*H* in which he played Major Frank Burns. They also worked together on the 1998 legal thriller The Gingerbread Man in which he played the villain.
The other major collaborator of Robert Duvall’s career was Francis Ford Coppola. They first worked together on 1969’s The Rain People, the story of a pregnant woman on a journey of self-discovery. Coppola and Duvall reunited on The Godfather and The Godfather Part II in which Duvall played Tom Hagen, the consigliere of the Corleone family. Duvall was originally intended to reprise the role in The Godfather Part III but the studio did not meet Duvall’s salary demands and the character was written out, much to that film’s detriment. However, Duvall did return to the character in some Godfather videogames released decades later. Duvall appeared in an uncredited role in Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation. They worked together again on Apocalypse Now, a surreal Vietnam war film in which Duvall played Colonel Kilgore. Duvall is only in the movie briefly but he makes a big impression. His line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” is one of the most popular pieces of dialogue.
Robert Duvall played musicians in a few movies. He acted with Jeff Bridges in the 2009 film Crazy Heart which can be seen as a companion piece to 1983’s Tender Mercies. Duvall played a washed up country singer who tries to put his life back together. It’s one of Duvall’s best performance and it won him the Academy Award for Best Actor but Tender Mercies is also one of the best examples of what made Duvall such as an interesting actor. Duvall had a gruff exterior and he could project abrasiveness but he also had a soulfulness that suggested sensitivity and depth. Those qualities are on display in Tender Mercies. In addition to acting in Tender Mercies, Duvall also wrote and performed some of the songs featured on the soundtrack.
As in Tender Mercies, Duvall often played gruff father figures and frequently to great acclaim. 1979’s The Great Santini starred Duvall as a military veteran who has a rocky relationship with his family. He played the mentor to Tom Cruise’s character in Days of Thunder and the father of Robert Downey Jr.’s character in The Judge, and the father of Billy Bob Thorton’s character in Sling Blade. Duvall also used that tough patriarch public image for comedy in the Will Ferrell film Kicking and Screaming and in the holiday movie Four Christmases.
Robert Duvall was frequently cast in westerns. Something about Duvall’s demeanor and face suited that genre, especially when he was mustachioed, and in fact Duvall lived his last thirty years on a farm in Virginia. His early television work included episodes of Shane, The Wild Wild West, and The Virginian. Duvall worked with several of the great talents in the western genre. One of his first films was 1969’s True Grit which starred John Wayne. He also acted alongside Clint Eastwood’s 1972’s Joe Kidd and he was in Kevin Costner’s 2003 western Open Range. Duvall played Jesse James in Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and he worked with filmmaker Walter Hill on Geronimo: An American Legend and 2006’s Broken Trail. Duvall also had the role of Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove, an immensely popular television miniseries that debuted in 1989. Duvall directed, cowrote, and starred in 2015’s Wild Horses.
In addition to acting, Duvall directed five features. We’re Not the Jet Set is a documentary about a Nebraska rodeo family. Angelo My Love is a slice of life story set in New York’s Romani community. Assassination Tango is a thriller set in Argentia, and Wild Horses is a western murder mystery.
Duvall’s most successful directorial project was 1997’s The Apostle. This was a a passion project for Duvall who had conceived of the film in the 1980s but it wasn’t completed until 1997 and Duvall is credited as an actor, writer, executive producer, and director. He plays a Pentecostal preacher who loses his marriage and his church. After a violent incident, he flees to a small town and founds a new congregation. This is one of Duvall’s best performances in part because it plays to the qualities that distinguished Duvall as an actor. Duvall had a tough and sometimes abrasive demeanor but many of his performances also possessed an understated tenderness and a masculine vulnerability. In The Apostle, Duvall played a deeply flawed man who is temperamental, controlling, and impulsive but also aspires to the goodness that he finds in Christianity. This films is also a depiction of smalltown America that is affectionate without being condescending and the members of the congregation are played by real looking actors who belong to that place. The Apostle was released on DVD but it hasn’t had a high definition disc release. It is available on various streaming services.
Duvall regularly played some historical figures, several of them from World War II, including Dwight Eisenhower in Ike: The War Years, Joseph Stalin in the 1992 TV movie Stalin, and Adolf Eichmann in 1996’s The Man Who Captured Eichmann. Duvall also played General Robert E. Lee in 2003’s Gods and Generals.
Duvall also played a lot of law enforcement roles in films such as Lawman, The Outfit, Colors, John Q., and We Own the Night. Among those law enforcement roles, Duvall’s performance in 1993’s Falling Down is exceptional. He’s cast in the familiar role of the detective trying to solve one last case before retirement but Duvall deepens the character and elevates the film.
He played the editor-in-chief of a daily newspaper in Ron Howard’s 1994 film The Paper. In a related role, Duvall played Joseph Pulitzer in the Disney musical Newsies.
Robert Duvall was a reliable actor whose output was actually quite diverse, as much or more so than his contemporaries. And unlike some other actors of his generation, Duvall never sold out. Not every film was a hit and he certainly made commercial decisions but Duvall did not trade on his image to make direct-to-video crap in exchange for a disproportionate paycheck. He built one of the great filmographies of his time, on the same level as Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman.