Robert Duvall, the Oscar-winning American actor whose taut restraint in The Godfather and ferocious charisma in Apocalypse Now made him a towering figure of modern cinema, has died at 95.
His wife, Luciana Duvall, announced his death in a statement posted to his Facebook page, saying he died peacefully at home “surrounded by love and comfort.” “To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller,” she wrote. “To me, he was simply everything.” No cause of death was disclosed.
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Duvall earned seven Academy Award nominations across a six-decade career and won best actor for 1983’s Tender Mercies, playing a broken-down country singer in a quiet, devastating performance written by Horton Foote. Foote had first steered him to film stardom two decades earlier, suggesting him for his screen debut as the spectral Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
His roles ranged from ruthless to wounded, from iron-willed to gently humane. In Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Duvall turned the family’s consigliere, Tom Hagen, into a study in coiled pragmatism and loyalty, earning a supporting actor nomination. He returned for The Godfather Part II but declined to appear in the third film over a pay dispute.
Perhaps his most indelible screen turn came in Coppola’s Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now (1979), where, in only a few minutes of screen time, he burned into film history as the surfing-obsessed Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore. Striding through smoke and shelling in aviators and cavalry hat, he delivered the line that became a cultural shorthand for battlefield bravado: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Duvall’s versatility and appetite for character were matched by productivity. He appeared in nearly 100 films, earning additional Oscar nominations for The Great Santini (1979), The Apostle (1997), A Civil Action (1998) and The Judge (2014). When studio projects held less appeal, he made his own: he wrote, directed and starred in The Apostle as a tormented Pentecostal preacher, and later created Assassination Tango, a noir-tinged love letter to the dance form he adored and to Argentina, where he met Luciana.
He was equally at home on the American frontier. Duvall won an Emmy for the western miniseries Broken Trail (2006), earned an Emmy nomination for Lonesome Dove (1989) and rode alongside John Wayne in True Grit (1969). He often cited Lonesome Dove’s Gus McCrae, the genial lawman-turned-cowboy, as his favorite role, telling the New York Times he had captured “a very specific individual guy” who reflected a crucial slice of the American West.
Born Jan. 5, 1931, in San Diego to a Navy admiral and an amateur actress, Duvall grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. After Principia College in Illinois and service in the U.S. Army, he moved to New York, where he roomed with Dustin Hoffman and befriended Gene Hackman as the trio chased acting work on stage and television.
Duvall carried that theater-honed discipline to the screen, developing a reputation for spare, truthful portrayals and an aversion to grandstanding. He often portrayed forceful leaders — notably Lt. Col. “Bull” Meechum in The Great Santini and the title role in the TV film Stalin — but he seemed just as compelled by the fallen and searching men at the margins.
Offscreen, Duvall’s passions were as robust as his filmography. He split time between Los Angeles, Argentina and a 360-acre farm in Virginia, where he converted a barn into a tango hall. He and Luciana, his fourth wife, shared a birthday — Jan. 5 — 41 years apart.
Tributes from across Hollywood and beyond praised an actor who could command a scene with a glance and ground epic spectacle in lived-in truth. As Luciana Duvall wrote, his enduring legacy is the “truth of the human spirit” he brought to every character.
With reporting from PA and Reuters.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
