Robert Duvall obituary: eminent actor from New Hollywood and beyond

“Smell that? Do you smell that…? Napalm, son.” Colonel Kilgore, US Cav, calling down fire from the skies. “The smell, that gasoline smell. Smells like… Victory.” 

There aren’t many more pungent monologues in American movies than this. The way Robert Duvall conjures the aroma, wafting his fingers beneath his nose like he’s sitting down to a delicious meal… The prolonged pause he takes before settling on the word “victory”, and the flat affect of his pronunciation of victory, even as it comes with a satisfied smirk. It’s a spellbinding performance – funny, horrifying – a portrait of absolute self-assurance – and moral oblivion –  in the midst of chaos and carnage, smoke, explosions (Kilgore doesn’t flinch). Chaos this man has orchestrated to fix up a surfing session before the tide turns. Duvall is on screen for 11 minutes in Apocalypse Now (1979) but it’s the most vivid and compelling 11 minutes in that brilliant and infuriating film. 

His association with director Francis Ford Coppola snaked back to a deft supporting turn as a lonely cop in The Rain People (1969), and then consigliere Tom Hagen in The Godfather I and II (1972, 1974). Producer Robert Evans wanted Steve McQueen or Paul Newman for the role, but Coppola rightly convinced him that Duvall’s insidious, soft-spoken intensity would be more effective. He immediately keyed into the quiet complicity that perpetuates the discreet rot that runs through these films.

Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were classmates when Duvall studied acting in New York in the early 60s. None of them would have been considered leading man material under the old studio system, but they broke through together as American cinema briefly took a harder look at where the country was at. Seemingly born middle-aged, his hairline in permanent retreat, Duvall nevertheless was taken up by the New Hollywood: he was the butt of Hawkeye’s scorn as Frank Burns in M*A*S*H (1970), rebellious worker bee THX 1138 for George Lucas (his first lead in Lucas’s 1971 debut feature), and then as a scarily psychotic Jesse James in Phil Kaufman’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (1972).

If there’s typically the whiff of the repressed about Duvall in these pictures (and let’s not forget he made his screen debut as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962), there’s also coiled anger, a man you would be foolish to take lightly. And so he proved a natural fit in hard-boiled action films too. Like Lee Marvin, Mel Gibson, Jason Statham and Jim Brown, he’s played Donald E Westlake’s Parker (albeit under the alias Earl Macklin, in The Outfit, 1973), and he was a mercenary for Sam Peckinpah in The Killer Elite (1975). In 1979, Kilgore in Apocalypse Now and Bull Meechum in The Great Santini were complimentary studies in destructive American machismo, and about as far down this road as Duvall was to travel. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Apocalypse Now and Best Actor for the latter a year later (the year De Niro won for Raging Bull). 

In his fifties (he was born in 1931) he essayed a gentler expression of troubled American masculinity playing an alcoholic country singer, Mac Sledge, in Tender Mercies (1983), a soft miracle of a film directed by Bruce Beresford and written by Horton Foote – the writer who had recommended him for To Kill a Mockingbird two decades earlier. Subtle, empathetic, it earned Duvall his Best Actor Award. 

Of his numerous cowboys, Augustus McCrae in the 1989 landmark miniseries Lonesome Dove is the standout. The project began as a screenplay with Peter Bogdanovich in the 1970s, with John Wayne and James Stewart earmarked to play the reluctant Texas cattle herders Woodrow and Gus, the roles inherited by Tommy Lee Jones and Duvall. It’s hard to imagine even Jimmy Stewart matching Duvall’s warmth and wit in this part – the actor’s favourite. “When I finished, I really felt like I did something complete and good at that exact moment,” he said. If Duvall coasted on a certain shtick in later years, this was where he perfected his blend of ornery, rascally charm.

We shouldn’t overlook Duvall’s directing credits either, albeit three of the five are virtually unknown, including an early rodeo documentary, We’re Not the Jet Set (1974). At the height of his success as an actor, Duvall dedicated much time to writing, producing and financing a film about Romani Americans, building his movie around a precocious ten-year-old street kid he encountered one day in New York, Angelo Evans. Casting Angelo’s family and friends to enact episodes Duvall constructed around them, this is not your typical actor’s film, but a slice of NYC neorealism, infused with cinema vérité instincts, though to be sure, Angelo himself is a natural performer. 

Finally there’s The Apostle (1997), another labour of love which he wrote, directed and starred in and which took many years to bring to fruition. Sonny, or ‘The Apostle E.F.’ as he rebrands himself,  is a southern evangelical, “a Jesus-filled preaching machine,”  who fights fiercely (and physically) for his self-made Church, but who, in the film’s sharp but nuanced elaboration, must also find humility in his fiery faith. Here, again, we find Duvall’s commitment to close observation, human paradox and complexity; his vigour and introspection, the loud and the quiet. The Apostle earned Duvall another Best Actor nomination, but seems to have slipped out of view in an America not-much invested in the hard-work of seeing past difference.

• Robert Duvall, 5 January 1931 to 15 February 2026.