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As Tom Hagen, the trusted consigliere to the Corleone crime family in The Godfather<\/em> saga<\/a>, Robert Duvall did what he did better than any other actor of his generation\u2014a generation that fed and fueled the New Hollywood revolution of the late \u201860s and \u201870s\u2014he listened<\/em>.<\/p>\n Make no mistake, Duvall was a bona fide Hollywood star with seven Oscar nominations and one win (for 1983\u2019s Tender Mercies<\/em><\/a>) 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\u2019t 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 entr\u00e9e like Duvall did during his brilliant seven-decade career. \u201cIt all begins with and ends with talking and listening,\u201d Duvall once said. \u201cI talk, you listen; you talk, I listen\u2026. That\u2019s the journey in an individual scene. There\u2019s no right or wrong; just truthful or untruthful.\u201d<\/p>\n Duvall died on Sunday, February 16 at age 95, his wife Luciana Duvall<\/strong> announced Monday via Facebook<\/a>. \u201cBob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThank 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 Scrounging for any kind of role in 60s New York, chasing girls, lending money to whichever of them was the most broke, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Duvall shared the risks, the rejections, and a fascination with the human drama. As they remember, stardom was unlikely\u2014and irrelevant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n 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\u2019s unfulfilled one.<\/p>\n After graduating from Illinois\u2019 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<\/strong>, with whom he shared a shabby apartment when they weren\u2019t passing one another on the way to menial jobs and no-hope auditions. They were hungry, in every sense of the word.<\/p>\n Duvall paid his early dues in New York\u2019s exploding off-Broadway scene in the late \u201850s, taking parts in such stage classics of the era as Arthur Miller\u2019s A View from the Bridge<\/em>. About that production, Hackman recalled to Vanity Fair<\/em><\/a>: \u201cIn the first rehearsal, Bobby already had this kind of physical thing he was doing\u2014like an animal\u2014kind of glided across the stage. I was really impressed.\u201d Night after night, performance after performance, tears would wet Duvall\u2019s cheeks during his final monologue. By the early \u201860s, Duvall had segued into supporting roles on television (Naked City<\/em>, The Twilight Zone<\/em>) and eventually motion pictures. As luck would have it, Duvall\u2019s debut film would become an instant classic\u20141962\u2019s To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>\u2014in which he played the misunderstood small-town bogeyman Boo Radley. Hoffman told Vanity Fair<\/em> in the same 2013 article, \u201cThe feeling was that Bobby was the new Brando. I felt he was the one, and probably I wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n