by Bill Trott
Feb. 16 – Oscar winner Robert Duvall, a versatile actor who left an indelible mark in a wide range of roles from starring roles as the napalm-loving Colonel in “Apocalypse Now” or the spectral Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has died at the age of 95, his wife said in a Facebook post.
“For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything he had to the truth of his characters and the human spirit they portrayed,” Luciana Duvall said in the Post.
Duvall played strong leaders such as Lieutenant Colonel Bull Mitchum in “The Great Santini” and the title character in “Stalin”, as well as broken and fallen characters in “Tender Mercies” and “The Apostle”. He won awards for both types of roles.
Duvall, the son of a Navy admiral and an amateur actress, grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. After graduating from Principia College in Illinois and serving in the U.S. Army, he moved to New York, where he worked with Dustin Hoffman and befriended Gene Hackman when all three of them were struggling with acting.
After working on a variety of television shows, Duvall made a strong impression even in smaller roles, such as his role as the mysterious recluse Boo Radley in his film debut, “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Duvall got the role at the suggestion of the film’s screenwriter Horton Foote, who had liked Duvall’s work in one of his plays.
Foote later wrote the 1983 film “Tender Mercies”, for which Duvall won an Academy Award for Best Actor as a washed-up country singer.
Perhaps Duvall’s most memorable role was in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam epic “Apocalypse Now,” in which he played off-kilter, surfing-obsessed Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore.
Duvall only got a few minutes of screen time, but he almost stole the movie as his character wandered across the battlefield after a successful attack and enthusiastically declared, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” It smells “like a win,” Kilgore said.
The role earned Duvall one of her seven Academy Award nominations. The second was a Best Supporting Actor award for Coppola’s “The Godfather”, in which he played Corleone mafia family advisor Tom Hagen. Duvall appeared in the second “Godfather” film but rejected the third because he considered the salary offer inadequate.
Duvall was also nominated for Oscars in 2014 for “The Great Santini,” “The Apostle,” “A Civil Action” and “The Judge.” Overall, he appeared in around 100 films.
Duvall was fond of playing cowboys. He won an Emmy for the television mini-series “Broken Trail”, appeared with John Wayne in “True Grit” and received an Emmy nomination for the mini-series “Lonesome Dove”. He often said that his favorite role was that of brilliant lawman-turned-cowboy Gus McRae in “Lonesome Dove.”
Duvall told The New York Times, “I think I’ve captured a very distinctive individual who represents something important in our history of the Western movement.” “After that, I thought I might as well retire, I might have done something.”
When Duvall became bored with Hollywood he made his own films. He wrote, directed, and won an Oscar acting nomination for “The Apostle,” the story of a controversial preacher.
Duvall did the same with “Assassination Tango”, a film that allowed him to showcase his passion for tango and Argentina, where he met his fourth wife, Luciana Pedraza. Both of them were born on January 5 but there was a difference of 41 years between them.
Duvall split his time between Los Angeles, Argentina, and a 360-acre farm in Virginia, where he converted the barn into a tango dance hall.
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