A Different Kind of Leading Man

Robert Duvall didn’t speak a word in his first film performance. When he was cast as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was but an up-and-coming theater actor, and his role as the silent, mysterious neighbor to the heroine Scout Finch was small but pivotal. With his shock of blond hair and his haunted, sunken eyes, he somehow looked both childlike and ancient, and although Duvall wouldn’t rise to proper fame for another 10 years, Mockingbird was, for most of the world, an introduction to a man who’d be one of Hollywood’s most versatile and fascinating screen presences for decades to come.

Duvall died yesterday at the age of 95, having never formally retired from acting. His last two roles, in 2022, were in the sports comedy Hustle and the gothic thriller The Pale Blue Eye, and had the same cranky verve and twinkle he’d long brought to movies. Even though he didn’t appear in a movie until he was 31, he made more than 140 of them, receiving an Academy Award (along with six other nominations), an Emmy, and four Golden Globes. He could carry a film thunderously, as in The Apostle or The Great Santini, but won an Oscar for his beautifully melancholic work in the low-key country-music drama Tender Mercies. He could swoop in with a supporting performance like his electrifying Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, rhapsodizing about the smell of napalm in the morning, but just as easily stand out in subtler roles, like his calming consigliere Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies.

Most important to his extraordinary legacy as an actor, Duvall just didn’t stop working, putting in fabulous turns in notable movies, but never phoning it in in the smaller, sillier fill-in roles he took along the way. His filmography tells the story of a changing industry several times over. It includes sturdy ’60s classics such as Mockingbird and True Grit; challenging ’70s movies like George Lucas’s THX 1138 and Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*; the beloved ’80s TV adaptation of Lonesome Dove; ’90s action hits such as Days of Thunder and Deep Impact; and fantastic 21st-century throwbacks like Open Range and We Own the Night. There are more than a dozen Duvall films you could plausibly pick as your favorite without being laughed out of the room, a truism that some of his best-known peers, such as Al Pacino or Robert De Niro, might struggle to replicate.

Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931, the son of a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and an amateur actress; through his mother, he was reportedly related to Robert E. Lee, whom he would later play in the 2003 film Gods and Generals. He was raised mostly in Maryland, where his father worked at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. But Duvall didn’t follow in his footsteps, leaving the Army after two years; he then studied at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City alongside future luminaries such as Dustin Hoffman, James Caan, and Gene Hackman. Duvall spent the rest of the ’50s on the stage, largely working at Long Island’s Gateway Playhouse; the screenwriter of Mockingbird, Horton Foote, spotted him and recommended him for the Boo Radley role.

Although striking, Duvall’s wordless work in Mockingbird hardly led to instant fame. His proper breakouts came in the Korean War satire M*A*S*H*, in which he played the infuriated villain Major Frank Burns, and the challenging sci-fi epic THX 1138, which saw him play a functionary chased by robot policemen in a world that has outlawed emotions. His first Oscar nomination came for his crafty turn as Tom Hagen in The Godfather, a German Irish adopted brother to the Sicilian Mob family who always has one foot outside of the deepest inner circle. Duvall is logical, phlegmatic, but always steely here; he does scene-stealing work without ever having to raise his voice.

That’s not to say Duvall was incapable of going big. He could be a domineering presence, a champion deliverer of monologues, and Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola handed him some of the greatest in movie history for Apocalypse Now, the Vietnam War epic that landed Duvall his second Oscar nomination. In Network, as a harried TV executive, Duvall is similarly roaring, spitting some great Paddy Chayefsky soliloquies with relish. Maybe the apex of this style for Duvall was his work as the terrifying but impotent Marine veteran Bull Meechum in The Great Santini (for which he received his third Oscar nomination), who channels his rage at his family when he doesn’t have a war to fight in. Bald from a young age, Duvall dropped the hairpieces early on and used his bullet-headed image to his advantage, a unique visage that undergirded his complex portrayals of masculinity.

Like his acclaimed contemporaries Pacino, Hoffman, and Hackman, Duvall did not cut the kind of clean, handsome image of movie stars from decades prior; he was earthier and meaner, his face more lined. He’d risen to fame later, and in an era (the New Hollywood of the ’70s) that rewarded shades of gray. When he finally won his Oscar in 1984, for Tender Mercies, he was playing a sympathetic but flawed man, a washed-up recovering alcoholic musician trying to pull his life back together. It’s a gorgeous performance that the film’s distributor, Universal Pictures, initially didn’t know what to do with; it put the movie in theaters with zero fanfare and quickly sold it to cable TV, where it became a hit, collecting surprise awards more than a year after its release.

Duvall largely shifted to smaller work as he aged. The Apostle in 1997 was something of a leading-role comeback, a dark independent film that Duvall wrote and directed and that seemed to owe as much to the Sundance generation of the ’90s as to Duvall’s New Hollywood of the ’70s. He collected two other Oscar nominations for reliable supporting turns in the legal dramas A Civil Action and The Judge, as well as a slew of attention for high-profile TV projects such as Lonesome Dove, Stalin, and Broken Trail.

He was married four times with no children; Duvall’s last partnership was with the actor Luciana Pedraza, whom he co-starred with in the thriller Assassination Tango; they were married from 2005 until his death. “I think everybody has vulnerability. Even when I played Stalin I found vulnerability,” he said in a 2014 interview looking back on his career. When asked if he had an epitaph planned for his career, he declined to think of one. “‘Ashes.’ No, I don’t know. I don’t need a gravestone. Cremation’s fine with me.”