With a huge back catalogue of films Robert Duvall had a wide number of memorable roles with many of Hollywood’s greatest directors
Born 5th January 1931 in San Diego , Robert Seldon Duvall was a child of a military family. His father was a US navy admiral and his mother, herself an amateur actress, was related to an American Civil war General so its little wonder that many of Robert Duvall’s most memorable roles were characters with such backgrounds.
Graduating from an Illinois Christian Scientist school in 1953 he joined the army for a year before studying acting in New York where he shared an apartment with Dustin Hoffman. Both were part of a bigger group of actors that included Jon Voight, James Caan, Elliot Gould and Gene Hackman. Alongside Hackman the late 1950’s saw them both looking for work which their faces did not fit eventually getting small TV roles before he finally made his big screen debut in 1962’s To Kill A Mockingbird as Boo Radley albeit it in a non-speaking role. The stage proved more fruitful workwise for him including the stage version of Wait Until Dark.
By the mid 1960’s he had married Barbara Benjamin and supporting roles began to come his way in films such as True Grit, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Rain People’ and George Lucas feature film debut ‘THX-1138’ (1971). But it was Coppola’s casting of him as the consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather that marked him out – No mean feat with such a dynamic cast that included Brando in a role that Duvall repeated for the sequel but refused for Part III in 1990. It was a role that earned him an Oscar nomination.
1975 saw divorced and the decade found him in a number of bad guy roles in films as diverse as Joe Kidd ( with Clint Eastwood), Sam Peckinpah’s ‘The Killer Elite’ and the Oscar winning ‘Network’ (1976) and the end of the decade saw him work once again with Coppola in Apocalypse Now in a seminal role as the appropriately named General Kilgore waxing lyrical about the smell of napalm in the morning as all manner of carnage goes on in the back ground.
1982 saw him marry his second wife Gail Young an actress and producer but it lasted only for four years. But that decade saw him diversify into gentler roles winning his first and only Oscar for ‘Tender Mercies’ and also begin directing. Having made a documentary in 1977 about farmers he made his feature film debut feature with ‘Angelo My Love’ (1984) that used a non actor cast. 1997 saw him helm The Apostle, a passion project that he had been struggling to make for over 13 years and earned rave reviews on its release after he had had to finance it himself as well as writing and starring in it which earned him another Oscar nomination. It was the third of five films that he would direct and would follow it with 2002’s Assassination Tango and 2015’s Wild Horses neither of which performed particularly well at the box office.
By the late 1980’s he was beginning to play far more paternal roles in films such a Colors, Days of Thunder, Rambling Rose and The Paper. But those films were balanced out with bigger brasher films such as blockbusters Deep Impact, The 6th Day, Jack Reacher as well as the controversial Falling Down opposite Michael Douglas both playing men dealing with marriage but opposites side of the law albeit unwittingly in Douglas case as he raged against the injustices of society that were often minor irritants blown up in his own mind. Having married Sharon Brophy in 1991 the decade also saw him divorce for a third time in 1996.
But he married for a fourth and final time in 2004 to actress Luciana Pedraza but like all his previous marriages he had no children.
One of his last films was The Judge (2014) that earned him his last Oscar nomination and at the time became the oldest actor to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor at 83 years of age in what would be his fifth nomination throughout his career ( the others were for The Great Santini in 1981, and A Civil Action in 2015)., His final film would be 2022’s The Pale Blue Eye with Christian Bale, Timothy Spall & Toby Jones
He died at his home on 15th February 2026 aged 95.
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