I sat around all last night with Robert Duvall and the responsibility of doing him justice living full-time in my head. Everyone knows he was one of the greatest actors to walk the earth. His resume is so long that one could develop arthritis in their thumb just scrolling through his credits on IMDB. His career spanned more than 60 years, touching eight decades.
Think about that. Eight decades.
What’s more to the point, beyond his prolific nature and on-screen tenure, is how much quality there is to contend with when poring over a lifetime of credits. What to leave in? What to leave out? It’s all so impossible, but I’m going to give it a try.
Robert Duvall spent the early part of his career in episodic television before taking on the role of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. Without a single word, Duvall took on the unspoken role of the ever-so-quiet hero. Duvall needed no words to express the inherent goodness of Boo Radley. At this point, ever so early on, I feel the need to state that Robert Duvall was in To Kill a Mockingbird. That would have been enough for any actor for the entirety of their screen life, but Duvall had so much more to do and give.
To Kill a Mockingbird did not prove to be a springboard for Duvall. The already 31-year-old actor would return to guest spots on TV (often in westerns) with the occasional supporting (and typically small) role in notable films like Captain Newman MD (1963), The Chase (1966), Bullitt (1968), and True Grit (1969), before earning a co-lead in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rain People (1970) alongside (prophetically) James Caan.
1970 would prove a pivotal year for Duvall. He would originate the role of Frank Burns in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, proving his comedic chops, playing the horny but righteous major/physician during the Korean War. The very next year, Duvall would score his first full-on lead in the directorial debut of George Lucas, THX-1138, a dystopian sci-fi drama.
Having worked with close friends Coppola and Lucas, Coppola set Duvall up for the role that would make him: consigliere of the Corleone family in Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Tom Hagen. As the adopted son of Don Vito (Marlon Brando), Duvall’s Hagen was both an adopted son and a trusted (to a point) legal advisor. Duvall captured the nature of a man on both the inside and the outside of a crime family. Hagan was family and employee, and on certain occasions, the twain could not meet. That same year, Duvall would further his western bona fides in Joe Kidd, alongside Clint Eastwood.
Two years later, Duvall would re-team with Coppola twice. First for a small part in The Conversation, then for a reprisal of his role as Tom Hagen in The Godfather Part II (yes, Coppola produced two masterpieces in one calendar year). Perhaps Duvall’s finest moment in the two Godfather movies he appeared in was when turncoat Tessio (Abe Vigoda) asks Hagan to give him a break for “old time’s sake,” and Duvall smiles and says, “Can’t do it, Sally.” Some things can’t be undone, even those things that are about to be done.
In 1976, Duvall earned solid notices for playing (Elementary, My Dear) Watson opposite Nicol Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Percent Solution. Better yet, was his cameo in Sidney Lumet’s prescient media satire, Network. As ratings-obsessed and morally challenged studio executive, Frank Hackett, Duvall may well have had the second best line in the film after Howard Beale’s (Peter Finch) “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!,” when he says, “Big fat, big titty hit!!” when speaking of the exploitative direction of the news division.
As if to prove that he would willingly turn up in any quality production, Duvall played the uncredited part of “Priest on a swing” in Philip Kaufmann’s superior remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). 1979 would prove to be one of the greatest years of Duvall’s acting life. First, he played Lt. Colonel Kilgore in Coppola’s Vietnam War masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning” has become one of the most repeated and nihilistic lines in cinematic history. In a much smaller film, Duvall played another veteran in The Great Santini. As Bull Meechun, a frustrated Marine fighter pilot, Duvall was a domineering father who was particularly hard on his son (Michael O’Keefe). The scene where his boy finally beats him in a one-on-one basketball game, and Bull takes the loss so poorly that he keeps bouncing the ball off his son’s head in pursuit of a rematch, is one of the great depictions of bad parenting. After an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Godfather, Duvall earned his second nomination in that category for Apocalypse Now, and his first Academy nod as a lead for The Great Santini.
In 1981, Duvall played a detective opposite a Monsignor played by Robert De Niro, in the deeply underrated Catholic crime drama True Confessions, directed by Ulu Grosbard. 1983 would bring to Duvall another signature role (in a history of signature roles) as the withdrawn country singer (Duvall was a fine singer and acoustic guitarist), Mac Sledge, in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies. However “small” one might think Tender Mercies to be, Duvall proved that from small things, big things come. His simple line reading of “I don’t trust happiness” speaks to every disappointment a broken heart has ever known.
Duvall played sportswriter Max Mercy in Barry Levinson’s much-beloved baseball drama The Natural, starring Robert Redford, before suffering one of the longest quality droughts of his career. 1985-1987 passed without much notice, before Duvall’s outstanding performance as a veteran detective teaching the overly cocky Sean Penn the ropes in Dennis Hopper’s borderline wild take on Los Angelesgang warfare in Colors (1988). However controversial and racially insensitive, critics deemed Colors, Duvall emerged from the film praised and unscathed.
As a former Texas Ranger on a 1500-mile sojourn out west, Gus McCrae, Duvall scored another signature role in the legendary TV miniseries, Lonesome Dove (1989). You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more beloved miniseries than Lonesome Dove, and for that matter, a more beloved character than Gus McCrae. Hell, Duvall was so good on horseback in this 19th-century depiction of American exploration that Ricky Schroder’s presence could do no damage. The series earned 19 Emmy nominations and seven wins, but somehow Duvall was left wanting. A fact that still stirs thoughtful minds into a frenzy.
As Duvall approached his sixties, he settled into the sort of veteran presence that might not always have led to the most prominent role, but often to the film’s best performance. 1990’s Days of Thunder, a Tom Cruise vehicle about a racer in a stock car vehicle, may not be the headiest film, but Duvall’s crusty mechanic sure classed the proceedings up. The Oscar-nominated Rambling Rose (1991) was all the better for Duvall’s turn as a patriarch who takes in a troubled young woman (Laura Dern).
I would be remiss not to mention the cult following of 1992’s Newsies, especially since my mother-in-law, JoAnn Harris, has a step-out vocal in the turn-of-the-19th-century musical that earned few good reviews and delivered weak box-office results, yet has a legion of fans.
Duvall’s veteran presence made more of the angry white man film, Falling Down, than it probably deserved. The slept-on 1994 journo dramedy The Paper has aged well, in part due to Duvall’s flinty performance as editor-in-chief Bernie White. 1995’s Something to Talk About, a low-key Julia Roberts countrified romantic comedy, is made all the better for Duvall’s chemistry with Gena Rowlands as Roberts’ mother and father.
In Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade, Duvall shows up late in the film as Thornton’s character’s reprehensible and absent father, speaking few lines, but making every second count just by his very presence. Thornton returned the favor in Duvall’s third film as a director (after the little-seen documentary We’re Not the Jet Set in 1974 and the drama Angelo, My Love in 1983), The Apostle (1997), a film about a southern preacher whose life falls apart after he discovers his wife (Farrah Fawcett) is having an affair. Sling Blade and The Apostle form a forceful Southern Gothic one-two punch. With The Apostle, Duvall directed himself to his second (and last) leading actor Oscar nomination.
The next year would find Duvall receiving another Oscar nomination (Supporting Actor) in the otherwise underwhelming courtroom drama, A Civil Action. Few would argue for the artistic merit of 2000’s Gone in Sixty Seconds or 2002’s John Q, but both were at least marginally improved by Duvall’s involvement.
2002 would also see Duvall’s fourth turn behind the camera as the director and star of Assassination Tango. While the film failed to find an audience or critical traction, it did indulge Duvall’s love of the tango and win him his future wife, co-star Luciana Pedraza. Pedraza would be his companion for the remainder of his life.
Two of Duvall’s best late-career roles arrived in 2003: General Robert E. Lee in the Civil War epic Gods and Generals and cattle runner Boss Spearman in Kevin Costner’s great western Open Range. There is an extraordinary scene before the apex of the film in Open Range when Costner’s Charley Waite, a man who normally defers to Boss, explains to the cattle runner what he’s in for prior to a gun battle. Boss argues that he’s been in a fight before. Charley explains that what’s about to happen isn’t a “fight,” but a battle to the death. In Boss’s face, you see the grave nature of understanding. This time, he will be deferring to Charley. It may well be the finest moment of Costner’s acting career, but that’s in large part due to Duvall’s active listening.
Post-Open Range, Duvall took on supporting roles for the remainder of his on-screen career. Highlights include Thank You For Smoking (2005), We Own the Night (2007), 2009’s heady trifecta of The Road, Get Low, and Crazy Heart, Jack Reacher (2012), his final Oscar nominated role in The Judge (2014), Steve McQueen’s outstanding thriller Widows (2018), and finally, the Adam Sandler basketball film Hustle and The Pale Blue Eye starring Christian Bale in 2022.
As I combed my way through all of Duvall’s credits, I discovered something: I don’t have a favorite Robert Duvall performance. How the hell can anyone choose? Today, I viewed a behind-the-scenes video on Kevin Costner’s Instagram regarding his time with Duvall on Open Range. In it, Costner can be heard saying, “We’re going to be gone one day, and all that’s left are going to be these movies.”
The movies that Duvall has left behind comprise one of the greatest lists of credits of any actor who has ever lived. How do you quantify that? How do you choose one over all the rest? Maybe the tribute rests in the fact that you can’t. For all the words I just spent on him, I know I didn’t come close. But then, how could anyone?
Robert Duvall died on February 15, 2026. He was 95 years old.
