HOLLYWOOD LEGEND DUVALL DIES AGED 95

Duvall made the smallest parts unforgettable – just look at ‘Apocalypse Now’

US actor stole the show in many films including ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘The Godfather’

“As a bloodthirsty Vietnam veteran, 

he delivered one of the most horribly 

memorable lines in all cinema”

17 feb 2026 - Irish Independent

Photo: Getty

● Oscar winner Robert Duvall, a versatile actor who made lasting impressions in a range of films from starring to supporting roles, has died aged 95. Duvall, who appeared in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, died peacefully on Sunday, according to his wife. Robert Duvall, who has died aged 95, was a Hollywood supporting actor of distinction who, with the exception of his Oscar-winning performance in Tender Mercies in 1983, rarely graduated to leading roles. But he had a filmography more extensive than that of almost any other actor of modern times.

In American television, he worked consistently. He was often the star attraction, portraying such historical figures as US president Dwight D Eisenhower.

He once said that, where most actors rarely work more than three times a year – if they are lucky – he aimed to be employed constantly. He lived up to that ambition.

Duvall was in demand because he had the ability to make small parts almost as memorable as the leads – none more so than in The Godfather (1972).

Though Marlon Brando’s virtuoso performance in the title role took the Academy Award for Best Actor, filmgoers remembered equally Al Pacino as his son and Duvall as the mafia family’s consigliere, their suave legal adviser.

Robert Selden Duvall was born on January 5, 1931, in San Diego, the son of a rear admiral, and was educated at Principia College, Illinois.

After serving in the army for two years in Korea, he gravitated to New York and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse for acting classes.

Duvall’s mother had been an amateur actor and quickened his interest in theatre; as a child, he would comb his hair like Laurence Olivier and do Hamlet in the mirror.

In New York, he played in stock and off-Broadway productions. His first review was a stinker – “Robert Duvall, whose spine tends toward a figure S, whose diction is flannel-coated, and whose simpering expressions are moronic” – and he toyed with quitting. But the director Ulu Grosbard believed in him, and gave him his breakthrough role: as the sullen longshoreman Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge.

By then, Duvall was sharing a flat with two other future Oscar winners: Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. But it was Duvall who had the momentum. There was a feeling in the air that he was the new Brando. “Bobby already had this kind of physical thing that he was doing, like an animal, kind of glided across the stage,” Hackman said.

Another early-stage success came in The Midnight Caller by Horton Foote, who was so struck by Duvall’s work that when he was subsequently hired to write the screenplay for a film of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, he passed on the tip to prospective director Robert Mulligan. Mulligan hired him, so this became Duvall’s first film in 1962.

It was a small part but a key one: a simple-minded character called Boo Radley. Though Gregory Peck won the Best Actor Oscar in the showier role of Atticus Finch – the lawyer who defends a black prisoner wrongly accused of rape – Duvall’s cameo registered strongly and won him a string of supporting roles in Hollywood.

Among Hollywood’s rising-star directors for whom he worked at this time were Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Peter Yates and George Lucas. For Altman, he played an astronaut’s instructor in Countdown (1967) and then a stressed-out military officer in Korea in M*A*S*H (1970).

Yates gave him a minuscule role as a cab driver in Bullitt (1968). He worked only once with Lucas, long before Star Wars , in THX 1138 (1971). It was the lead role as a robot in an early science-fiction film, rarely seen then and almost never now.

A more fruitful partnership was with Coppola. They worked together first on The Rain People (1969), with Duvall playing a motorcycle cop who attempts to rape a woman. It was another small part, but Coppola was sufficiently impressed to remember him for his role in The Godfather.

He also cast him in The Conversation (1974), unbilled, in a single scene where he plays the sinister figure whose audio tape is the focus of the drama. It turns on a snatch of recorded conversation (“He’d kill us if he got the chance”), which opens up a whole new dimension to the drama.

After the two Godfather films came a fifth collaboration with Coppola, to which he contributed another unforgettable cameo.

This was Apocalypse Now (1979), in which he was cast as a bloodthirsty Vietnam veteran called Kilgore, who delivers one of the most horribly memorable lines in all cinema: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells of victory.”

It was a performance so conspicuously over the top, yet so compelling, that it seriously challenged the postwar assumptions that the “method” held the key to effective dramatic delivery.

Duvall had dabbled with method acting in the early 1960s, but had come to the conclusion that the craze was “bullshit”.

He had also grown out of his childhood admiration for Laurence Olivier, too, dismissing him as “too stylised”.

But although he shunned the fashion for the method acting, he was not immune from the heightened regard that 1960s actors felt for their artistry.

On the set of True Grit (1969), he nearly came to blows with John Wayne after Duvall blew his top at the director, Henry Hathaway.

He found the anger that gave his roles gravitas came with the disadvantage of a short fuse: “It’s hard to be diplomatic when you’re using yourself, your own temperament, to give what the character calls for,” he said.

An attempt was made to propel him into lead roles. In Network (1976) he had a key role as a tough television executive, but he still lagged behind William Holden and Oscar winners Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway. In the same year, he played Dr Watson to Nicol Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, managing a tolerable English accent. But it was only a shared abovethe-line credit.

He won his first Best Actor Oscar nomination for The Great Santini (1979), as a fighter pilot who nearly drives his family mad with repressive military discipline.

Another film in which he had to share top billing was True Confessions (1981), in which Duvall and Robert De Niro played brothers – one a police officer, the other a monsignor – on different sides of an inquiry into the murder of a sex worker in 1940s Los Angeles.

The two actors had been in the same film before (The Godfather Part II )but not in the same sequence, so True Confessions represented a tantalising opportunity to compare their styles. Neither, however, was at his best here and the moment was missed. The director was Grosbard – who had admired Duvall in his Broadway days.

Duvall eventually won a Best Actor Oscar for Tender Mercies (1983), as a washed-up, drunken country and western star, who sobers up thanks to the love of a woman and stages a triumphant comeback.

It was certainly a lead performance, though less compelling than his supporting role in Apocalypse Now .Hedid his own singing, too – always a bullish move when such a part is not played by a natural canary. But Duvall had form: as a young man he had entertained his friends with his impersonations of Hank Williams.

His later acting career has been respected rather than acclaimed, though exceptions include the much-admired TV mini-series Lonesome Dove (1989). Specialising in macho men with a sensitive core, the western had always suited him as a genre.

It continued to treat him kindly in the 2000s, when Kevin Costner gave Duvall top billing in his acclaimed Open Range (2003). There was also an Emmy for Duvall’s 2006 television series Broken Trail.

Always popular, audiences were glad to welcome him as a guarantee of competence, at worst, and brilliance, at best. (© Telegraph Media Group Holdings Ltd)