Robert Duvall, the US actor who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of an over-the-hill country singer in the film Tender Mercies and also delivered memorable performances in two The Godfather pictures and Apocalypse Now, has died. He was 95.
Duvall died Sunday at his home, according to a social post attributed to his wife, Luciana Duvall, which didn't specify a cause of death. He had long lived at a horse farm in Fauquier County, Virginia, the Washington Post reported.
Known for his ability to play diverse characters, Duvall built a resume that few actors matched. He appeared in more than 80 films. With parts in To Kill a Mockingbird, Apocalypse Now, M*A*S*H and Network, he was among the most represented actors in the American Film Institute's Top 100 movies.
He was nominated for an Academy Award seven times, the first as best supporting actor for his role as a consigliere to the Corleone organized crime family in The Godfather (1972). He was in the running for seven Golden Globe awards, winning four times.
Awarded the National Medal of Arts by President George W. Bush in 2005, he continued working into his 90s, appearing in films including 12 Mighty Orphans (2021) with Apocalypse Now co-star Martin Sheen, Hustle (2022) with Adam Sandler and the Netflix film The Pale Blue Eye with Christian Bale (2022).
“He makes other actors look good,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote in 1983. “He brings a quality to his listening, his reactions, that charges a scene even when he's not talking.”
Duvall was perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated role as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). A battle-hardened veteran from a renegade unit of the US Air Cavalry during the Vietnam War, Kilgore seems oblivious to the bombs exploding around him as he struts about in sunglasses and a Stetson-like hat in search of the best waves to surf and assigns playing cards to corpses to taunt the enemy.
“Charlie don't surf” and “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” were Kilgore lines that Duvall was prodded to relive in later years when fans greeted him.
“This guy was not crazy, but maybe the culmination of the bizarreness of that whole Air Cavalry mentality,” the actor said of Kilgore in a 1991 interview.
A descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Duvall was cast as the Southern army commander in the US Civil War film Gods and Generals (2003), with some scenes filmed on Duvall's own estate in Virginia.
He won Golden Globe awards for portraying Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in a 1992 TV movie of the same name, and for playing a worn-out Texas Ranger in the 1989 television miniseries Lonesome Dove — a role he said was especially important to him.
“I think I nailed a very specific individual guy who represents something important in our history of the western movement,” he was quoted as saying in a 2003 New York Times story. “After that, I felt I could retire, that I'd done something.”
The Great Santini (1979), about a Marine officer who struggles as a husband and father, gained him another Oscar nomination, as did The Apostle (1997), a character study of a flawed Pentecostal preacher. Duvall wrote the script and directed the film.
His Academy Award in 1984 was for his performance as Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, about a broken-down, alcoholic musician trying to start a new life.
Robert Selden Duvall was born on Jan. 5, 1931, in San Diego. His father, William Duvall, was a military officer who became a US Navy admiral, and his mother, Mildred Virginia Hart, was an actress. He graduated with a major in drama from Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, in 1953. He then spent two years in the US Army.
Under the GI Bill, Duvall attended the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in New York. There he studied under Sanford Meisner with Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and James Caan as classmates.
His role in the mid-1950s play The Midnight Caller, written by Horton Foote, provided the breakthrough in Duvall's career when Foote recommended the young actor for the part of Arthur “Boo” Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), starring Gregory Peck. The character appeared only briefly at the end of the film and he didn't utter a word. Foote wrote the screenplay, which was based on the novel by Harper Lee.
Film roles in True Grit (1969) and M*A*S*H (1970), in which he played Major Frank Burns, followed. Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Tom Hagen, a mob family's counselor and adviser in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, the 1974 sequel.
Duvall often said he had no regrets about not reprising the role in Godfather, Part III (1990) a decision made because he felt undervalued by the producers. “There are two or three other actors in that film being paid more than I was offered,” Duvall told Parade magazine in 1990. “That just isn't right.”
After three “failed marriages,” Duvall in 2005 wed Luciana Pedraza, an Argentinian actress and director 41 years his junior. Duvall considered Buenos Aires his favorite city, where he indulged his passion for tango dancing. The couple, the city and the dance are captured in Assassination Tango, a 2002 film that Duvall also wrote and directed.
He had no children. “I would have had them if I could,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Telegraph newspaper. The Robert Duvall Children's Fund was established in 2001 to help underprivileged families.
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