As Tom Hagen, the trusted consigliere to the Corleone crime family in The Godfather saga, Robert Duvall did what he did better than any other actor of his generation—a generation that fed and fueled the New Hollywood revolution of the late ‘60s and ‘70s—he listened.
Make no mistake, Duvall was a bona fide Hollywood star with seven Oscar nominations and one win (for 1983’s Tender Mercies) to his credit. But deep down, the California native was a character actor through and through. On screen, he was authentic and selfless, pushing those around him to shine a little brighter than they otherwise would have. Showboating just wasn’t his style. Instead, he propped up others like a reinforced steel buttress, never demanding the close-up or the girl. No one could turn a side dish into an entrée like Duvall did during his brilliant seven-decade career. “It all begins with and ends with talking and listening,” Duvall once said. “I talk, you listen; you talk, I listen…. That’s the journey in an individual scene. There’s no right or wrong; just truthful or untruthful.”
Duvall died on Sunday, February 16 at age 95, his wife Luciana Duvall announced Monday via Facebook. “Bob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,” she wrote. “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.”
Born in San Diego in 1931, Robert Duvall was the child of a Navy rear admiral and a mother who had put her own acting ambitions aside to raise a family. His father thought that Duvall would follow in his footsteps with a career in the military, but instead the path that the young man would forge was his mother’s unfulfilled one.
After graduating from Illinois’ Principia College where he majored in drama, Duvall served in the army from 1953 to 1954, narrowly missing out on the Korean War. On the GI Bill, he began studying at The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City under the legendary Sanford Meisner. His classmates included two other struggling actors, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, with whom he shared a shabby apartment when they weren’t passing one another on the way to menial jobs and no-hope auditions. They were hungry, in every sense of the word.
Duvall paid his early dues in New York’s exploding off-Broadway scene in the late ‘50s, taking parts in such stage classics of the era as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. About that production, Hackman recalled to Vanity Fair: “In the first rehearsal, Bobby already had this kind of physical thing he was doing—like an animal—kind of glided across the stage. I was really impressed.” Night after night, performance after performance, tears would wet Duvall’s cheeks during his final monologue. By the early ‘60s, Duvall had segued into supporting roles on television (Naked City, The Twilight Zone) and eventually motion pictures. As luck would have it, Duvall’s debut film would become an instant classic—1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird—in which he played the misunderstood small-town bogeyman Boo Radley. Hoffman told Vanity Fair in the same 2013 article, “The feeling was that Bobby was the new Brando. I felt he was the one, and probably I wasn’t.”
