Perennial Hollywood star and Academy Award winner Robert Duvall has died. According to his wife, Duvall passed away in Virginia on Sunday. He was 95 years old.
“To the world,” Duvall’s wife, Luciana Pedraza, said in a statement, ”he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything. His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all. Thank you for the years of support you showed Bob and for giving us this time and privacy to celebrate the memories he leaves behind.”
Born in California in 1931, Duvall served in the Army during the Korean War, then studied theater in New York City under the famous acting teacher Sanford Meisner alongside future stars like James Caan and Dustin Hoffman. After getting some early work in New York, his film debut came in 1962’s famed movie version of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, where he played the mysterious Boo Radley.
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It is impossible to imagine the great Hollywood movies of the 1970s without Duvall. He appeared in many of the period’s greatest films — including The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, M*A*S*H, Network, and Apocalypse Now.
In The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Duvall played Tom Hagen, the consigliere and lawyer to Vito Corleone and the Corleone family. Duvall reprised the role for director Francis Ford Coppola two years later, in The Godfather Part II. The first Godfather earned Duvall the first of his seven Academy Award nominations.
Although Duvall had many memorable roles across a decades-long career, his most famous performance arguably came in another Coppola movie, 1979’s Apocalypse Now. He only had a handful of minutes of screen time as the merciless Lt. Kilgore, but he made them count. His delivery of the famous line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” went down in history as one of the great quotes in film history
Duvall earned his second Oscar nomination for Apocalypse Now, but he didn’t win an Academy Award until four years later, when he starred in Bruce Beresford’s soft-spoken drama Tender Mercies. Playing a washed-up country singer, Duval’s Mac Sledge tries to clean up his life and begins a relationship with a Texas widow. This scene, between Duvall and co-star Tess Harper, is another quietly devastating career highlight.
This is just a small sampling of Duvall’s greatest moments onscreen; a full accounting wouldn’t take 95 years, but it’d come pretty close. Duvall was also nominated for Oscars for his work in The Great Santini, The Apostle, A Civil Action, and 2015’s The Judge, and his other notable films include George Lucas’ THX 1138, The Outfit, Days of Thunder, Ron Howard’s The Paper, Sling Blade, and Deep Impact. His final onscreen role came in 2022’s The Pale Blue Eyes — exactly 60 years after his debut in To Kill a Mockingbird.
The man had an incredible career and produced an enviable body of work. He will be missed, but if he had appeared in half as many iconic ’70s and ’80s movies as he did, he would be remembered forever.
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