“You smell that? Do you smell that? ... Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says Robert Duvall as the mad, hawkish, surf-loving Lt Col Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s two-and-a-half hour nightmarish ride through Vietnam.
Wearing a black stetson with a cavalry sword emblem and sunglasses, Kilgore is certainly a caricature of the American military, but Duvall, who has died aged 95, gave him a terrifying reality. Presenting a man who is only as insane as the war around him, his brief appearance was central to the film.
Duvall, with his stern features and fixed gaze, seemed born to play psychotic soldiers, gangsters and cops. There has always been a recognition in American films that the line between the military, mobsters and the police is a fine one, and Duvall walked it with perfect equilibrium.
Among his roles in uniform were the disturbed soldier in Captain Newman MD (1963); Major Frank Burns, the military doctor driven crazy by the boorish heroes of M*A*S*H (1970), and the Nazi officer plotting to kidnap Churchill in The Eagle Has Landed (1976). His portrayal in The Great Santini (1979) of a peacetime officer unable to think outside the military code even when it comes to his relationship with his family, a toned-down version of Kilgore, won him his first best actor Oscar nomination.
Duvall, who was born in San Diego, California, grew up among the military. His father, William, was a US navy admiral and his mother, Mildred (nee Hart), was related to the American civil war general Robert E Lee, whom Duvall would play in Gods and Generals (2003).
He was educated at Principia College, Illinois, a Christian Scientist school, and in 1953, after graduating, joined the army, where he stayed for over a year. He then studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York under Sanford Meisner.
He shared an apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood with Dustin Hoffman, and was one of a group of then unknown actors, including Hoffman, Gene Hackman, James Caan, Elliott Gould and Jon Voight, who would get together regularly for poetry and play readings, followed by a party. In order to survive, Duvall sorted letters during the night shift at the Times Square post office.
In the late 1950s, Duvall and Hackman did not have the sort of faces that fitted the time, a message that came through to them as they did the rounds of the agencies. Nevertheless, Duvall started getting a few parts in television shows. His big-screen debut was as the recluse Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a non-speaking but crucial role. He was cast on the recommendation of the film’s screenwriter, Horton Foote, who met Duvall at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
On stage, the part that proved a breakthrough for Duvall was as the longshoreman Eddie Carbone in a revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge at the Sheridan Square Playhouse in New York in 1965, for which he won an Obie. Following the run of 780 performances, Duvall spent most of 1966 as a conman terrorising a blind woman (Lee Remick) in Wait Until Dark on Broadway.
Duvall continued in supporting film roles, such as the southern cuckolded husband in Arthur Penn’s The Chase (1966), an outlaw in Henry Hathaway’s True Grit (1969) and a cynical cop in Coppola’s The Rain People (also 1969), until he was cast in the title role of George Lucas’s first feature, THX-1138 (1971), an Orwellian nightmare in which Duvall was a social rebel in a society where sex is forbidden.
His reputation became firmly established in Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), and its 1974 sequel, in which he played the sharp lawyer, Tom Hagen, go-between, confidant and retainer to the all-powerful Corleone family. His strong, discreet performance held the family and, indeed, the two films together, and he was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor. (His presence was sorely missed in The Godfather: Part III, 1990).
Out west, he was less restrained but still effective as a psycho-charlatan Jesse James in Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972) and an unscrupulous rancher who hires an equally unscrupulous bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood) to kill a Mexican bandit in Joe Kidd (1972). Duvall continued to be a nasty piece of work as an avenging ex-con in The Outfit (1973); in Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (1975), he was head of an enemy organisation out to kill a Taiwanese politician, and in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), he was riveting as a television company’s ferocious hatchet man. “We’re not a respectable network. We’re a whorehouse network, and we have to take whatever we can get,” the character remarks.
Even when playing cops, ostensibly on the right side of the law, the actor brought moral ambiguity into roles such as the New York detective in Badge 373 (1973), an unpleasant thriller based on the exploits of Eddie Egan, the man who inspired the French Connection movies; and in True Confessions (1981), he was the tough, dedicated detective counterpointing Robert De Niro’s ambitious priest, in which the cop and the priest have the same instincts.
After all these variations on evil, Duvall stated that he wanted a chance to portray a good person. The result was his best actor Oscar-winning role in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies (1983), written by his friend Foote. Superb as the rejuvenated over-the-hill country-and-western singer, saved by his own hidden resources and the love of a good woman, he not only sang competently but was able to generate a warmth denied him for most of his previous career.
Continuing to diversify, he turned director, investing his own money and three years of his time in Angelo My Love (1984), a gentle, sympathetic tale of a Gypsy boy growing up in New York, with a non-professional cast. He had previously directed a documentary called We’re Not the Jet Set (1977), about the Nebraska farm people he met while making The Rain People.
As an actor, Duvall managed to move away from cops and hoodlums. He was an excellent Dr Watson, complete with English accent, to Nicol Williamson’s Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976); and overplayed, for once, as a foppish southern dandy in Jerzy Skolimowski’s allegorical The Lightship (1985), pitted against a sea captain played by Klaus Maria Brandauer.
But he was still at his best in the sort of roles that had brought him fame, such as the weary street-wise LA cop in Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988), in which he exuded a paternal protectiveness towards Sean Penn’s arrogant rookie, as he did towards Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder (1990), bringing a finely tuned performance into the formula racing-car movie. His kindly avuncular southern gentleman, alongside the formidable duo of Diane Ladd and Laura Dern in Rambling Rose (1991), was a marvellous turn.
Yet, though the performances Duvall gave continued to be watchable, some of the films in which he appeared were less so. One of the better ones was Ron Howard’s The Paper (1994) in which, according to the critic Roger Ebert, “Robert Duvall plays the paper’s editor with such depth that he turns an essentially supporting role into the man’s life story – a story of broken marriages, estranged children, nightly drinking and hidden desperation, all contained in a package of unbending journalistic integrity.”
Duvall was no believer in method acting, likening the technique to walking on crutches when you have two good legs of your own. His style came from acute observation of people, and his long stored-up memories of individual quirks that he called upon to enrich his characters.
In 1997, The Apostle, which Duvall had been trying to make for 13 years, finally opened to rave reviews. Because the major studios had turned him down, Duvall not only bankrolled the film, but also produced, wrote, directed and starred in it. The beautifully detailed character study of a Pentecostal preacher on a quest for atonement has bible belt locations, a fine supporting cast and a tour de force, Oscar-nominated performance by Duvall in the title role.
Less ambitious and less successful was Assassination Tango (2002), also directed, written and starring Duvall as a pony-tailed hitman with a taste for the tango. Through his own interest in tango, on a visit to Buenos Aires he met Luciana Pedraza, whom he married in 2005.
On television, he gained much satisfaction from western miniseries such as Lonesome Dove (1989) and Broken Trail (2006, for which he won an Emmy).
Duvall continued to be active into his 90s, often playing grizzled, stubborn men, and able to elevate even mediocre material. Although The Judge (2014), one of his last major films, gathered mixed reviews, Duvall was praised in the title role, becoming the oldest actor to that date to be nominated for a best supporting actor Academy award.
Duvall is survived by Pedraza, his fourth wife. Three earlier marriages ended in divorce.
• Robert Selden Duvall, actor, born 5 January 1931; died 15 February 2026
• Ronald Bergan died in 2020
