Robert Duvall

Oscar-winning actor Robert Duvall was born on January 5, 1931, in San Diego, California, the son of a career military officer who later became an admiral. Duvall majored in drama at Principia College (Elsah, Illinois), then served a two-year hitch in the army after graduating in 1953. He began attending The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre In New York City on the G.I. Bill in 1955, studying under Sanford Meisner along with Dustin Hoffman, with whom Duvall shared an apartment. Both were close to another struggling young actor named Gene Hackman. Meisner cast Duvall in the play The Midnight Caller by Horton Foote, a link that would prove critical to his career, as it was Foote who recommended Duvall to play the mentally disabled Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), his motion picture debut.

Robert Duvall began making a name for himself as a stage actor in New York, winning an Obie Award in 1965 playing incest-minded longshoreman Eddie Carbone in the off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, a production for which his old roommate Hoffman was assistant director. In his autobiography, Miller wrote that he was impressed by Duvall's work as Carbone and was surpirsed when, introduced to the actor back stage, the playwright found out that the young man was nothing like Eddie, but was polite and well-mannered and from a good family, so totally had Duvall given himself to the role and become Eddie Carbone.

 

Duvall  found steady work in episodic TV and appeared as a modestly billed character actor in films, such as Arthur Penn's The Chase (1965) with Marlon Brando and in Robert Altman's Countdown (1968) and Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People (1969), in both of which he co-starred with James Caan.  He was also memorable as the heavy who is shot by John Wayne at the climax of True Grit (1969) and was the first Major Frank Burns, creating the character in Altman's Korean War comedy M*A*S*H (1970). He also appeared as the eponymous lead in George Lucas' directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971). It was Francis Ford Coppola, casting The Godfather (1972), who reunited Duvall with Brando and Caan and provided him with his career breakthrough as mob lawyer Tom Hagen. He received the first of his six Oscar nominations for the role.

Thereafter, Duvall had steady work in featured roles in such films as The Godfather: Part II (1974), The Killer Elite (1975), Network (1976), The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976). Occassionally, this actor's actor got the chance to assay a lead role, most notably in Tomorrow (1972), in which he was brilliant as William Faulkner's inarticulate backwoods farmer. He was less impressive as the lead in Badge 373 (1973), in which he played a character based on real-life NYC policeman Eddie Egan, the same man his old friend Gene Hackman had won an Oscar for playing, in fictionalized form, as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971).

It was his appearance as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in another Francis Coppola masterpiece, Apocalypse Now (1979), that solidified Robert Duvall's reputation as a great actor. He won his second Academy Award nomination for the role, and was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most versatile actor in the world! Duvall created one of the most memorable characters ever assayed on film, and gave the world the memorable phrase, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning".

Subsequently, Duvall proved one of the few established character actors to move from supporting to leading roles, with his Oscar-nominated turns in The Great Santini (1979) and Tender Mercies (1983), the latter of which won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Now at the summit of his career, Duvall seemed to be afflicted with the fabled "Oscar curse" that had overwhelmed the careers of fellow Academy Award winners Luise Rainer, Rod Steiger and Cliff Robertson. He could not find work equal to his talents, either due to his post-Oscar salary demands or a lack of perception in the industry that he truly was leading man material. He did not appear in The Godfather: Part III (1990) as the studio would not give in to his demands for a salary commensurate with that of Al Pacino, who was receiving $5 million to reprise Michael Corleone.

Robert Duvall's greatest achievement in his immediate post-Oscar period was his acclaimed characterization of the grizzled Texas Ranger Gus McCrae in the TV mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989), for which he received an Emmy nomination. He received a second Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in Stalin (1992), and a third Emmy nomination playing Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in The Man Who Captured Eichmann (1996).

The shakeout of his career doldrums was that Robert Duvall eventually settled back into his status as one of the premier character actors in the industry, rivaled only by his old friend Gene Hackman. Duvall, unlike Hackman, also has directed pictures, including the documentary We're Not the Jet Set (1977), Angelo My Love (1983) and Assassination Tango (2002). As a writer-director, Duvall gave himself one of his most memorable roles, that of the preacher on the run from the law in The Apostle (1997), a brilliant performance for which he received his third Best Actor nomination and fifth Oscar nomination overall. The film brought Duvall back to the front ranks of great actors, and was followed by a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for A Civil Action (1998).

Robert Duvall will long be remembered as one of the great naturalistic American screen actors in the mode of Spencer Tracy and his frequent co-star Marlon Brando. His performances as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Jackson Fentry in Tomorrow, Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies, Frank Hackett in Network (1976), Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, Bull Meechum in The Great Santini, Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, Gus McCrae in Lonesome Dove and Sonny Dewey in The Apostle rank as some of the finest acting ever committed to film. It's a body of work that few actors can equal, let alone surpass.