Despite his impassive eyes, balding pate, and slit of a smile, Robert Duvall could be volcanic and melancholic, mysterious and straightforward, vengeful and merciful. Perhaps no modern American actor marshaled his gifts to such excitingly eclectic ends or with such a lack of concern for whether or not he was the featured player. In several of his most significant films, Duvall was far from being the star, but the intensity of his presence was such that he often eclipsed his betters.
Duvall, who died on Feb. 15 at age 95, demanded attention in such ensemble films as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), M*A*S*H (1970), and Network (1976), and on no fewer than three occasions — first in The Chase (1966), then in The Godfather (1972), and finally in Apocalypse Now (1979) — his relentless ferocity contrasted nicely with the wandering naturalism of his more famous co-star, Marlon Brando. And when Duvall had the screen to himself, he took full advantage of it. It is hard to imagine a performance more relentlessly aggressive than his in The Great Santini (1979), nor one more meekly passive than his in Tender Mercies (1983), for which he won an Oscar as best actor — the only such win for Duvall amid a raft of nominations.
Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931, and, perhaps unexpectedly, his upbringing provided him with raw material that he would later mine as a performer. He was the son of a Navy admiral — surely a man he had in mind when playing the combustible Marine pilot Bull Meechum in The Great Santini — and, while a youth, he was inculcated in the Christian Science faith, the same denomination as the author of two of his greatest screenplays, To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies: Horton Foote. Duvall chose to attend a Christian Science-affiliated school, Principia College, from which he graduated in 1953.
There followed a long period during which Duvall racked up credits in regional theater and off-Broadway. He also became a fixture on television, where he would have been regularly encountered by loyal viewers of The Naked City and Route 66. By the time he turned up in To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall already had the countenance of someone wise, strange, even middle-aged — perfect for his part of the often-spoken of but seldom-encountered Boo Radley. That part accelerated his career on the small and big screens, though he continued to hover in the background. He was decidedly not the star of Bullitt (1968), The Detective (1968), or True Grit (1969), and although he had a pivotal part and a sympathetic young director (Francis Ford Coppola) in 1969’s The Rain People, that female-centric movie belonged to its troubled heroine, played by Shirley Knight.
Coppola, though, seized on Duvall and incorporated him into his company, American Zoetrope: Duvall was the star of the Zoetrope-produced, George Lucas-directed experiment in aesthetically minimalistic science-fiction, THX 1138 (1971), and he was utterly arresting as Tom Hagen in Coppola’s The Godfather — the first of his performances to merit an Oscar nomination. Coppola later prevailed upon Duvall to join him in the Philippines to make the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, in which Duvall’s Col. Kilgore utters the heartless but unforgettable words “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” He gives a more controlled performance than any of his co-stars, including Martin Sheen, Dennis Hopper, and Brando. Tellingly, Duvall was the only actor in Apocalypse Now to be Oscar-nominated.
Coppola was not the only director to detect reserves of ruthlessness within Duvall. In Network, Sidney Lumet cast Duvall as Frank Hackett, a broadcast television executive who barks about his lack of principles loudly and often. More quietly vigorous was his performance in Tender Mercies. Duvall played Mac Sledge, a past-his-prime country-music singer ground down by personal problems but rejuvenated by the things he finds far from the limelight — namely, religious commitment (he is baptized midway through the film), and the promise of a new relationship with an ordinary woman played, majestically, by Tess Harper.
Bolstered by Tender Mercies, Duvall attained a certain ubiquity — he was in big movies (1984’s The Natural), small ones (1988’s Colors), and even rather junky ones (1990’s Days of Thunder). He had integrity and commitment in each, and he was still given opportunities to walk away with a movie: he was a police officer achingly near retirement in Falling Down (1993), a fearsome newspaper editor in The Paper (1994), and a comically incoherent loon in The Gingerbread Man (1998), the last directed by Robert Altman, who had awarded him key early parts in Countdown (1968) and M*A*S*H. Duvall proved to be a competent, eloquent director with The Apostle (1997), and even his own senescence did not prevent him from logging good performances in such late-in-the-game efforts as The Judge (2014), co-starring with Robert Downey Jr.
Duvall leaves in his wake many classic films to which he always contributed in abundance.
Peter Tonguette is the film critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.