Robert Duvall, an actor who changed the way people saw movies and plays, dies aged 95.
Robert Duvall died on Sunday. He was an actor who could turn himself into a business-focused Mafia lawyer, a faded country singer, a cynical police detective, a bullying Marine pilot, a surfing-obsessed Vietnam commander, a mysterious Southern recluse, and many other characters in movies, on stage, and on TV. He was 95 years old.
His wife, Luciana Duvall, claimed in a statement that he had died at home. She didn’t say anything else. He had lived for a long time on a big horse farm in The Plains, Fauquier County, Virginia, which is west of Washington.
Bruce Beresford, the Australian who directed Mr. Duvall in the 1983 film “Tender Mercies,” said that Mr. Duvall’s ability to go so thoroughly into his parts that he appeared to nearly dissolve into them was “uncanny, even creepy the first time” he saw it.
Mr. Duvall portrayed Mac Sledge in the movie. He was a drunk, washed-up country singer who learned to deal with life by marrying a widow with a little boy. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this portrayal. It was his first Oscar, however he was nominated six more times for both leading and supporting parts.
Mr. Beresford observed of Sledge, “He is the character.” “He’s not Duvall at all.”
But Mr. Duvall didn’t believe it. He remarked in an interview with The New York Times in 1989, “What do you mean?” “I don’t become the character!” It’s still me, but I’ve changed.
People who saw it and critics still weren’t persuaded. For them, Mr. Duvall, whose voice was far from smooth and whose looks were not quite movie-star attractive, became a whole different person over and over again.
He was known for being exceedingly studious during his long career in movies that began in the early 1960s. He had an ear for how people spoke and an eye for how they acted, even as a youngster in a Navy family that traveled throughout the nation. He once quipped, “I hang around a guy’s memories.” He often kept insights that he learned in his thoughts for later use.
He sang in a country band and traveled throughout East Texas with a buddy to be ready for the part of Mac Sledge. His companion eventually had to ask what they were doing. Mr. Duvall responded, “We’re looking for accents.”
He spent time with other, and often shady, people on similar quests. He became friends with criminals in East Harlem while getting ready for a part that would help him become a star: Tom Hagen, the smart advisor to the Corleone crime family in Francis Ford Coppola’s first two “Godfather” movies in the early 1970s.
Before portraying a tough detective in “True Confessions” (1981), he hung around with police officers. He spent time with an ex-convict to get ready for one of his most famous theatrical performances, as the hustler Teach in the original 1977 Broadway production of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo.” The ex-convict gave him the idea to carry his revolver over his genitals.
He did similar immersions for other famous roles, like Lt. Col. Bull Meechum, the frustrated warrior without a war (except within his own family) in “The Great Santini” (1979); Frank Hackett, the aptly named hatchet-man executive in “Network” (1976), Paddy Chayefsky’s scathing take on television news; or Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, who loved “the smell of napalm in the morning” in Mr. Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979). Mr. Duvall told interviewers that for years, people would come up to him and say that sentence as if it were a secret only he and they knew.
His ability to change like a chameleon caused some to compare him to the great Laurence Olivier. In fact, in 1980, Vincent Canby of The Times named him “the American Olivier.” Earlier, Herbert Ross, who directed “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), said something similar. In that movie, Mr. Duvall portrayed Dr. John Watson alongside Nicol Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes, but he looked quite different. In the movie, Olivier portrayed Holmes’s arch-nemesis, Professor James Moriarty.
Mr. Ross noted at the time that “only Mr. Duvall and George C. Scott have the range and variety of Laurence Olivier.”
In his debut movie, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which came out in 1962 and was based on Harper Lee’s book about racial prejudice in a Southern town, it was clear that Mr. Duvall could become almost anything he wanted to be. He portrayed Boo Radley, the quiet, hollow-eyed neighbor who is interesting and finally saves the two tiny children of defense lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck).
Many of Mr. Duvall’s admirers were astonished to see him in that movie after his career took off in the 1970s and 1980s. Harper Lee, on the other hand, didn’t seem shocked. She wrote Mr. Duvall a telegram to congratulate him when he got the role. She scribbled, “Hey, Boo.” He mentioned subsequently that this was the only time he had spoken to her.
Mr. Duvall had a favorite part that wasn’t one of his big-screen roles. He assured interviewers over and over again that he was entirely behind Augustus McCrae, an elderly Texas Ranger on a cattle drive in “Lonesome Dove,” a CBS miniseries from 1989 based on a Larry McMurtry book.
Mr. Duvall responded, “Let the English play Hamlet and King Lear.” “I will play Augustus McCrae, a great character in literature.”
He got an Emmy nomination for his role. But it took him almost 20 years to win an Emmy for playing the worn-out cowboy Prentice Ritter in “Broken Trail” (2006), a two-part AMC movie that reminded him of Gus McCrae. He also won an Emmy for best mini-series as an executive producer on the program.
Mr. Duvall has attempted directing movies a few times, generally putting up the money for projects that interested him. There was “We’re Not the Jet Set” (1977), a documentary about a Nebraska rodeo family. “Angelo My Love” (1983) is a movie about Gypsy life in New York City that came about after a male met a girl on the street.
No other project he worked on had as much of his heart and soul in it as “The Apostle” (1997), which he wrote, funded, and acted in. He portrayed Sonny Dewey, a Pentecostal pastor who had gone astray and was looking for salvation. He was nominated for another Oscar.
Mr. Duvall was typically suspicious of directors, and several of them said he was hard to deal with. He and Henry Hathaway, who directed him and John Wayne in the first “True Grit” (1969), clashed a lot on site.
“I don’t try to be a hard guy to work with,” Mr. Duvall said in a 1981 interview with American Film magazine. “But I decide what I’m going to do with a character. I will take direction, but only if it kind of supplements what I want to do. If I have instincts that I feel are right, I don’t want anybody to tamper with them. I don’t like tamperers, and I don’t like hoverers.”
Not all directors irritated him. He liked working with Ulu Grosbard, who guided him in “True Confessions,” as well as onstage in an early Duvall triumph, as the tormented longshoreman Eddie Carbone in a 1965 Off Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” and later in Mr. Mamet’s “American Buffalo.” (Once his film career kicked into high gear, Mr. Duvall did not return often to the theater, but he described his occasional stage work as “an investment in the long run — it makes you a better actor.”)Robert Duvall
And then there was Mr. Coppola, who as much as anyone put Mr. Duvall on the Hollywood map. “Coppola made them so beautifully,” the actor said of the first two “Godfather” films. His admiration did not stretch far enough, however, to impel him to recreate the role of Tom Hagen for “The Godfather: Part III” (1990) — a pale sequel, most reviewers agreed. Robert Duvall
Early TV Roles
Robert Selden Duvall was born on Jan. 5, 1931, in San Diego, the second of three sons of William Duvall, a rear admiral, and Mildred (Hart) Duvall, an amateur actress said to have been a relative of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
The father’s naval career meant that the family moved around a lot. Robert found his way into acting while at Principia College, a small liberal arts school in southwestern Illinois — a career choice shaped in large measure, he once said, by a realization that he was “terrible” at everything else.
After two years in the Army, serving principally at what is now Fort Gordon in Georgia, he went to New York in 1955, where he studied under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. Two of his closest friends, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, were fellow acting students. To support himself, Mr. Duvall worked for a while in a post office branch. But soon enough, television roles fell his way, on shows like “Playhouse 90,” “Naked City” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Then came the invitation to play Boo Radley.
Throughout his career, Mr. Duvall tried to keep Hollywood at arm’s length. He preferred living elsewhere — for many years on the Northern Virginia ranch with his fourth wife, the former Luciana Pedraza, an Argentine woman 41 years his junior. They met in the 1990s in Buenos Aires, which he visited often after developing a passion for the tango. Robert Duvall
Complete information about his survivors was not immediately available. Robert Duvall
He was a Hollywood outlier on another front: politics. He was an ardent conservative, strongly supporting Republican presidential candidates, in a film world dominated by political liberals. In 2005, President George W. Bush awarded him a National Medal of Arts. Mr. Duvall, however, was not conspicuously a supporter of President Trump.Robert Duvall
As the years passed, major roles fell Mr. Duvall’s way less frequently. Or perhaps he sought them less. All the same, he still commanded meaty parts, which he imbued with characteristic intelligence, whether as an engagingly irascible editor in “The Paper” (1994), or a sensitive small-town doctor in “Phenomenon” (1996), or a retired astronaut brought back to duty to rescue a world threatened by a giant comet in “Deep Impact” (1998), or a diligent lawyer in “A Civil Action” (1998), or an understanding bartender ministering to a boozing country singer in “Crazy Heart” (2009). One of his last major roles, in 2014, was in “The Judge,” in which he played an aging jurist in a small town who is accused of murder.Robert Duvall
From early on, Mr. Duvall enjoyed the life of a supporting actor. “Somebody once said that the best life in the world is the life of a second leading man,” Mr. Duvall told The Times. “You travel, you get a per diem, and you’ve probably got a better part anyway. And you don’t have the weight of the entire movie on your shoulders.”Robert Duvall
