Robert Duvall Gave His Characters—and Us—Grace

Some actors melt into their roles, or at least attempt to do so, wrapping themselves in a cloak of anonymity as they slip into a character. But Robert Duvall, who died on Feb. 15 at age 95, didn’t—not quite. He was too much of a presence for that: From the silky-smooth fixer Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies (1972 and 1974), to Lt. Kilgore, the outlandish lover of Wagner and surfing in Apocalypse Now (1979), to the true-believer and seeker of redemption Sonny in The Apostle (1997), and beyond, Duvall vested the characters he played with a livewire crackle that was distinctively his own, a current of energy that you couldn’t divorce from his definitive physicality. His eyes could be steely; they could also dance with light and joy. The characters he specialized in weren’t always immediately likable or wholly trustworthy, but he beckoned and seduced us into believing in them. That was his gift: he didn’t so much shift shape as shift something in us, opening us up to human complexities and contradictions that made the world seem bigger, not smaller.

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Duvall, born in San Diego in 1931, spent much of the 1960s as other aspiring actors of his generation did, in small roles on television. Though he made his film debut as the misunderstood recluse Boo Radley in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird, TV kept him working through the decade: his credits included small-screen staples like Route 66, The Fugitive, Outer Limits, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. But the 1970s were truly his decade. He played plenty of memorable jerks, like the supercilious yet incompetent surgeon Major Frank Burns in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), or the slash-and-burn TV executive Frank Hackett in Network (1976). These were characters you loved to hate: Duvall gave them the kind of jagged charisma that made you want to know what these men were going to do next. And even if you couldn’t approve of the distasteful, immoral work done by Tom Hagen in the Godfather movies, Duvall knew how to wrap it all in a leather-bound slipcase. Tom made terrible, indefensible acts seem somehow socially acceptable—it is, after all, what a fixer does—and Duvall made it feel chillingly real.

Duvall’s Lt. Kilgore, of Apocalypse Now, may have had one of the most tiresomely quoted lines in all of 1970s moviedom—the one about loving the smell of napalm in the morning—but his character has a gruff complexity that can’t be encapsulated with one line. Even his very carriage seems to harbor secrets: Kilgore is a hard-ass, a walking scowl, but even so, he’s a man with a past and a future we can only guess at. A Duvall performance never stopped at a movie’s end; we could somehow imagine these characters living beyond the frame, inhabiting lives we’d never by privy to.

But if the 1970s were Duvall’s breakthrough decade, he may have done his greatest work midcareer, with The Apostle (1997), which he also wrote and directed. Duvall stars as Sonny, a Texas preacher whose life takes a violent turn when he discovers his wife (Farrah Fawcett) is having an affair. He leaves her lover in a coma and skips town, adopting a new name—he’s now the Apostle E.F.—and heading for Louisiana on a kind of personal redemption tour. Duvall’s Sonny is a showman through and through. He preaches the gospel as if it were a jazz text. Even as he stands alone in an empty room, dumping his frustration into a tirade directed at the Lord, his entreaties—“Gimme a sign or something! Blow this pain outta me!”—are brimming with holy-roller vigor. You might think he’s a flimflammer, yet time and again, Sonny proves he’s the real thing. Even though he’s a sinner, grace somehow flows right through his fingertips: we see it as he lays his hands on a young man who’s just been in a car crash and is about to die. Sonny makes sure this man is saved in his very last minute on Earth. His gift is that he doesn’t hog grace for himself; he passes it around so everyone feels it, a metaphor, maybe, for the best of what great actors can give us.

The male actors we loved in the 1970s, performers who drew the contours of a new kind of sometimes-tough but often tender masculinity, are slipping away from us. Gene Hackman, Robert Redford, Donald Sutherland, Peter Fonda: at one time brash, sexy, and unpredictable, these men eventually became the old guard, often segueing into crotchety old-man roles, the handy slots generally available for male actors of a certain age. Given how rigid human standards of beauty can be, actresses may have it harder than men do as they grow old. But men face their own challenges: no one looks forward to feeling diminished or forgotten as new, younger actors crowd the space around them. It’s hard to lose these performers for good, not least because their passing reminds us how quickly 50 years can flash by for any of us. But for film and TV actors, especially—people whose work lives beyond them—death can be a kind of rebirth. The old-man roles fall away in our memories, and we find ourselves spending more time remembering how they were when they were young and on fire. Duvall has now passed into that vale, his vitality restored, leaving a trail of movies in which he is still and always very much alive. And hallelujah for that.