Robert Duvall, the iconic actor who brought to life the suave mafia lawyer Tom Hagen in The Godfather and the surf-obsessed Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, has died at the age of 95, his wife, Luciana Duvall, confirmed Monday.
“Yesterday we said goodbye to my beloved husband, cherished friend, and one of the greatest actors of our time. Bob passed away peacefully at home,” she wrote.
Blunt-talking, prolific, and famously glitz-averse, Duvall won an Academy Award for Best Actor and received six additional Oscar nominations over a six-decade career. He excelled in both lead and supporting roles and later turned to directing.
“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” Luciana Duvall said. “His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court.”
Duvall won the Oscar in 1983 for his portrayal of a washed-up country singer in Tender Mercies. Yet his most enduring roles include Tom Hagen in The Godfather series and Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.
Kilgore, whose chilling line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” has become one of cinema’s most famous, was originally intended to be more extreme — named Colonel Carnage — but Duvall carefully toned it down, showcasing his meticulous approach to acting. “I did my homework,” he told Larry King in 2015. “I did my research.”
Duvall’s breakout came relatively late in Hollywood; he was 31 when he portrayed the mysterious Boo Radley in the 1962 adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He went on to inhabit an array of characters: a bullying executive in Network (1976), a strict Marine father in The Great Santini (1979), and the tender, washed-up singer in Tender Mercies.
Despite his fame, Duvall often cited his favorite role as Augustus McCrae in the 1989 TV mini-series Lonesome Dove, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel — a grizzled, wise-cracking Texas Ranger turned cowboy.
Film critic Elaine Mancini once described him as “the most technically proficient, the most versatile, and the most convincing actor on the screen in the United States.”
AFP
