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It came in the final 15 minutes of the film, and it didn’t include a single line of dialogue. Regardless, Robert Duvall’s appearance as the mysterious Arthur “Boo” Radley in 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird ranks as one of the most memorable screen debuts ever. It was also the start of a remarkable 60-year movie career for the Academy Award-winning actor. Equally at home on the stage and on television, Duvall–who died on Sunday at 95–was known for losing himself within his characters as well as the quiet intensity he brought to his roles.
A real-life military brat, Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931, the son of a U.S. Navy rear admiral. He spent much of his childhood in Annapolis, Md. After studying drama and graduating from Illinois’s Principia College in 1953, Robert failed to follow in his father’s nautical footsteps and instead spent a year in the Army. Upon leaving the service Duvall gravitated to New York to study acting under Stanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. His fellow students included James Caan, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman (he was roommates with the latter two). He found work as a post office clerk while performing in various regional companies, including the Gateway Playhouse on Long Island.
Robert’s off-Broadway debut came in a 1958 staging of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession…which closed after just five performances. Over the next decade he would be seen in such shows as The Crucible, A View from the Bridge (for which he won a 1965 Obie Award), and on Broadway in 1966 in Wait Until Dark. At the same time Duvall was finding work in television, from Armstrong Circle Theatre and Naked City to The Fugitive and The Time Tunnel. Perhaps his finest small-screen turn came in The Twilight Zone’s Season Four episode “Miniature,” where Robert played a lonely introvert who is drawn to a figure in a museum dollhouse.
It was Duvall’s 1957 stage performance in Horton Foote’s The Midnight Caller that led the writer, who was busy adapting To Kill a Mockingbird for Universal, to suggest that the studio hire him to portray the Finch family’s mysterious neighbor Boo. Over the remainder of the ’60s he picked up steady work in Hollywood in mostly supporting parts. He was a WWII veteran with PTSD-induced catatonia in Captain Newman, M.D. (1963); a NASA astronaut in Robert Altman’s Countdown (1967); a cab driver coming to Steve McQueen’s aid in Bullitt (1968); and an abusive highway cop in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Rain People (1969). 1969 also saw him gain cinematic infamy as ruthless frontier outlaw Ned Pepper, who shoots one-eyed marshal Rooster Cogburn’s (John Wayne) horse out from under him and aims to kill him, in True Grit.
Robert Altman reunited with Duvall when the director cast him as the pious, incompetent Maj. Frank Burns in his 1970 Korean War dark comedy M*A*S*H. The following year, a neophyte filmmaker named George Lucas tapped Duvall for the title role is his dystopic sci-fi drama THX-1138. 1972 would become a breakout year for the now-veteran actor, thanks to his performance as Tom Hagen, the “adopted” ward and consigliere to Mafia boss Don Vito Corleone, in Coppola’s epic crime saga The Godfather. The role would earn him his first Academy Award nomination (for Best Supporting Actor), and he would reprise it two years later in The Godfather Part II. ’72 also saw him play Jesse James in The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and co-star with Clint Eastwood in Joe Kidd.
In 1973 Robert went up against mobsters who killed his brother in The Outfit, and he was a hard-nosed cop in Badge 373, based on the exploits of The French Connection lawman Eddie Egan. He had a memorable cameo as Gene Hackman’s mystery client in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), and was a mercenary alongside his Godfather “brother” James Caan in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975). In Sidney Lumet’s 1976 media satire Network Duvall played a cynical TV executive, and that same year he got to show off a British accent as Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes thriller The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.
Duvall earned a second Oscar nomination as Lt. Col. Kilgore, who loves Wagner, surfing, and “the smell of napalm in the morning,” in Coppola’s Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now (1979). His third nom, and the first for Best Actor, came the following year for The Great Santini, where he played a stern Marine colonel who treats his family–particularly eldest son Ben (Michael O’Keefe)–like Boot Camp recruits. Robert finally won the elusive award for his turn as an alcoholic country singer who revives his career and finds redemption with a young widow (Tess Harper) in 1983’s Tender Mercies. Other key ’80s films included True Confessions (his first time working on-screen with Robert De Niro); opposite Robert Redford in The Natural (1984); and as a veteran LAPD officer mentoring a rookie cop (Sean Penn) in Colors (1987). On the small screen, Duvall returned to the Wild West in the epic 1989 mini-series Lonesome Dove.
Robert was Tom Cruise’s pit crew chief in the NASCAR drama Days of Thunder (1990) and that same year played the Commander in Volker Schlöndorff’s film version of The Handmaid’s Tale. The 1990s saw him in such films as Newsies (1992); Ron Howard’s underrated The Paper (1994); and as Billy Bob Thornton’s father in Sling Blade (1996). He got two more Oscar nominations in successive years; for Best Actor as a Pentecostal preacher on the run from the law in The Apostle (1997), and Best Supporting Actor as an unconventional corporate lawyer in A Civil Action (1998).
His work in the 2000s ranged from the Nicolas Cage actioner Gone in 60 Seconds (2000) and playing Robert E. Lee in the Civil War drama Gods and Generals (2003) to the Will Ferrell soccer comedy Kicking & Screaming (2005) and as Jeff Bridges’ old drinking buddy in Crazy Heart (2009). He won an Emmy for his work on the 2006 AMC western mini-series Broken Trail. Robert reunited with Cruise for 2013’s Jack Reacher and earned his final Academy Award nomination for playing hot-shot Chicago attorney Robert Downey, Jr.’s estranged jurist father in 2014’s The Judge. He served as writer, director, and star of the 2015 western drama Wild Horses, and Duvall’s final film role came in the 2022 gothic mystery The Pale Blue Eye.
Robert spent the last few years in retirement on his Northern Virginia farm with his fourth wife, Argentinian-born Luciana Pedraza (the two performed together in the 2002 film Assassination Tango, which Duvall also wrote and directed). It was Pedraza who announced that Duvall had passed away “peacefully at home” on February 15.
If his masterful body of work didn’t include a lot of leading roles, it apparently didn’t bother Duvall. In a New York Times interview, he explained, “Somebody once said that the best life in the world is the life of a second leading man. You travel, you get a per diem, and you’ve probably got a better part anyway. And you don’t have the weight of the entire movie on your shoulders.” He may not have felt that weight, but Robert Duvall’s remarkable talent helped him carry many a movie and made him unforgettable to his fans.
Click here to read MovieFanFare writer emeritus Irv Slifkin’s salute to Duvall and about how his encounter with the actor.