{"id":294461,"date":"2026-02-16T18:58:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T18:58:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/294461\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T18:58:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T18:58:08","slug":"godfather-apocalypse-now-actor-was-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/294461\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Godfather,’ ”Apocalypse Now’ Actor Was 95"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRobert Duvall<\/a>, the steely-eyed actor whose performances in the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, Lonesome Dove and The Apostle made him one of the finest actors of any generation, has died. He was 95.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuvall, who received an Academy Award \u2014 one of his seven Oscar nominations \u2014 for his performance as an alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), died Sunday at home on his Virginia ranch \u201csurrounded by love and comfort,\u201d his wife, Luciana, announced<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTo the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,\u201d she said in a statement. \u201cHis passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all. Thank you for the years of support you showed Bob and for giving us this time and privacy to celebrate the memories he leaves behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDuvall distinguished himself as an actor of major promise \u2014 even though he didn\u2019t have a line of dialogue \u2014 when he portrayed the reclusive Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Horton Foote, the film\u2019s screenwriter, personally recommended him for the role after seeing Duvall onstage in New York a few years earlier in Foote\u2019s The Midnight Caller.<\/p>\n

\n\tFoote was a major influence on Duvall; he also wrote the screenplays for Tender Mercies and another excellent Duvall film, Tomorrow (1972), and the actor starred in The Chase (1966), an adaptation of a Foote novel and play.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo too was director Francis Ford Coppola, who first cast Duvall in The Rain People (1969), then hired him to play the trusted family lawyer Tom Hagen in The Godfather<\/a> (1972) and The Godfather Part II<\/a> (1974) and the surfing-crazy Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979).<\/p>\n

\n\tDuvall\u2019s line in Apocalypse Now, \u201cI love the smell of napalm in the morning,\u201d <\/a>became the stuff of movie legend. With jets flying overhead and shells exploding nearby, the scene, shot in the Philippines, was done, amazingly, in one take.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere wasn\u2019t any time to think,\u201d Duvall told<\/a> Roger Ebert in 1983. \u201cI heard over the intercom that we only had the use of the jets for 20 minutes. One flyby and that was it. I just got completely into the character, and if he wouldn\u2019t flinch, I wouldn\u2019t flinch.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHowever, in a lifetime of great roles, Duvall\u2019s favorite was playing ex-Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae in the 1989 CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove, based on the Larry McMurtry<\/a> Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. He got the part when James Garner<\/a>, the first choice, said he wouldn\u2019t be able to ride a horse for long stretches. (Duvall, on the other hand, was an expert rider, having spent summers as a kid on his uncle\u2019s ranch in Montana.)<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI walked into the wardrobe room one day on Lonesome Dove and said, \u2018Boys, we\u2019re making the Godfather of Westerns,\u2019\u201d he told Stephen Colbert in 2021<\/a>. \u201cThey were the two biggest things in the last part of the 20th century, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA private, unpretentious person who eschewed the Hollywood limelight, the longtime Virginia resident composed and performed his own country ballads for his character, Mac Sledge, in his understated Tender Mercies performance.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuvall also received Oscar noms for his work as Hagen and Kilgore and\u00a0for portraying tough-as-nails Marine pilot Bull Meechum in The Great Santini (1979); for starring as Pentecostal preacher Eulis \u201cSonny\u201d Dewey in The Apostle (1997), which he also wrote, sang in, directed and financed; for playing the vicious but somehow charming corporate lawyer Jerome Facher in A Civil Action (1998); and for appearing as small-town magistrate Joseph Palmer, the father of Robert Downey Jr.\u2019s character, in The Judge (2015).<\/p>\n

\n\tAs a quick-triggered outlaw, Duvall engaged John Wayne<\/a> in a memorable shootout in True Grit (1969), and he stood out as the incompetent Major Frank Burns in Robert Altman<\/a>\u2018s M*A*S*H (1970), as an automaton in George Lucas\u2019 THX 1138 (1971) and as Mississippi cotton farmer Jackson Fentry in Tomorrow.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe played Dr. Watson in The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1976), a ruthless TV executive in Network (1976), a sportswriter in The Natural (1984) and a NASCAR crew chief in Days of Thunder (1990). As cops, he was in his element in The Detective (1968), True Confessions (1981) and Colors (1988).<\/p>\n

\n\tMore recently, Duvall starred as a Texas rancher in the family drama Wild Horses (2015), appeared in an adaptation of John Steinbeck\u2019s In Dubious Battle (2016),\u00a0played a Chicago power broker in Steve McQueen\u2019s Widows<\/a> (2018) and had cameos in 12 Mighty Orphans (2021) and Adam Sandler\u2019s Hustle<\/a> (2022).<\/p>\n

\n\tWhether it was a blockbuster or an indie film (he was an early champion of Robert Redford<\/a>\u2018s Sundance Film Festival, trekking to Park City before it became the \u201cin\u201d thing to do), Duvall without fail delivered finely honed performances, mixing in layers of individuality and never resorting to stock portrayals.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI had my own theory within a scene, where you trick yourself: To get a result that\u2019s legitimate, let the process take you to the result, rather than just going to the result,\u201d he said<\/a> in January 2016. \u201cBe willing to start from zero and say, \u2018Well, let\u2019s see what happens,\u2019 rather than the old-school, \u2018Give me something.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRobert Selden Duvall was born in San Diego on Jan. 5, 1931. His father, a career military man who eventually became an admiral, moved the family to the East Coast when he was 10, and the Duvalls resided mostly in the Annapolis, Maryland, area.<\/p>\n

\n\tFollowing high school, Duvall enrolled at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, where he majored in drama. He played an adult in a production of Arthur Miller\u2019s All My Sons and \u201cwas like totally at peace,\u201d he said<\/a> in a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair. \u201cI thought, \u2018Oh, wow, maybe I have something here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter two years in the Army, he moved to New York in 1955 and was accepted to study at Sanford Meisner\u2019s Neighborhood Playhouse. While paying his dues, Duvall roomed in a sixth-floor apartment at 109th Street and Broadway with another aspiring actor, Dustin Hoffman. They were pals with another wannabe, Gene Hackman<\/a>, whose wife cooked for them all the time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe feeling was that Bobby was the new Brando. I felt he was the one, and probably I wasn\u2019t,\u201d Hoffman said in the Vanity Fair piece.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuvall landed roles off-Broadway and on TV on Playhouse 90 and Naked City before Foote remembered him from Meisner\u2019s production of The Midnight Caller and recommended Duvall, then 31, to play the simple-minded Boo in To Kill a Mockingbird.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe quickly followed up with a number of roles, including a small turn as a cab driver in Bullitt (1968). In the years that followed, Duvall delivered eclectic performances in such fare as Joe Kidd (1972), The Outfit (1973), Breakout (1975) and The Killer Elite (1975).<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen he wrapped\u00a0Lonesome Dove, he said: \u201cI can retire now, I\u2019ve done something I can be proud of,\u201d he told<\/a> American Cowboy magazine. \u201cPlaying Augustus McCrae was kind of like my Hamlet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHis other movies include The Eagle Has Landed (1976), The Greatest (1977), The Betsy (1978), The Stone Boy (1984), The Lightship (1985), Let\u2019s Get Harry (1986), The Handmaid\u2019s Tale (1990), A Show of Force (1990), Rambling Rose (1991), Convicts (1991), Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), Falling Down (1993), Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), The Paper (1994), Sling Blade (1996), Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000), John Q (2002) and Assassination Tango (2002), which he also wrote, directed and produced.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1992, Duvall formed Butcher\u2019s Run Films, which produced A Family Thing (1996) and the 1996 TNT telefilm The Man Who Captured Eichmann, in which he played the merciless Nazi Adolph Eichmann.<\/p>\n

\n\tSurvivors include his fourth wife, an Argentina native who acted alongside her husband in Assassination Tango and Wild Horses. He did not have any children.<\/p>\n

\n\tDuane Byrge contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Robert Duvall, the steely-eyed actor whose performances in the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,20716,85,46,149345,5033,149346,39197,49521,149347],"class_list":{"0":"post-294461","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-francis-ford-coppola","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-john-wayne","13":"tag-obituaries","14":"tag-robert-altman","15":"tag-robert-duvall","16":"tag-the-godfather","17":"tag-the-godfather-part-ii"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}