Robert Duvall: 15 Essential Roles

The story goes that the legendary playwright Horton Foote saw Robert Duvall in a 1957 production of his work The Midnight Caller, and that inspired him to recommend the young actor for Duvall’s film debut in director Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird. Radley is a complex role, a character who is an outsider to the entire community and ends up being a savior to the Finch children. Duvall imbues him with such graceful interiority, playing him as three-dimensional instead of just a convenient plot device. Radley saves Jem and Scout, which makes him a hero, but he’s still the outsider in fictional Maycomb, Alabama, the one who the local kids (and some adults) found terrifying. After he saves her near the end of the film, Boo gives a look to Jem that conveys a well of affection and pride without a single line of dialogue. Duvall would carve out a career of characters who contained that silent strength, and it started here. —Brian Tallerico

Rip Torn was originally cast in this early Francis Ford Coppola drama about a woman on a road trip who’s attempting to outrun her unsatisfying life; he was supposed to play a highway patrolman who gives her a speeding ticket and ends up her taking her home, but he had to drop out for scheduling reasons before he’d shot a single scene. James Caan, who was starring alongside Shirley Knight, said he knew a guy who could sub in — a New York actor with a few impressive screen credits on his resumé (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Chase, Bullitt) named Bobby. This was Duvall’s first collaboration with Coppola, and though the role is relatively minor, it’s still a crucial one in terms of the movie’s tragic third act. It also offers a sneak peek of Duvall’s ability to seem simultaneously charismatic and menacing, as well as a preview of the many stern, shouting fathers he’d play later in his career. —David Fear

Uptight, unpleasant, unskilled, and yet somehow kissable, Duvall’s character in M*A*S*H, Major Frank Burns, is the first domino to fall in Robert Altman’s black comedy about wacky Korean War surgeons (which preceded the Vietnam-set TV series by two years). New arrivals Hawkeye and Duke peg the ultra-religious Burns as a jerk as soon as they meet him (and when he excoriates a younger soldier for accidentally killing a man, that first impression is confirmed) so they set about tormenting him any way they can, broadcasting Burns’ liaison with a female new arrival (“Kiss my hot lips,” she tells Duvall) and needling at him until he explodes. Duvall is the perfect straight man in film filled with goofballs. —Kory Grow

Tom Hagen is presented in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece as the cool head in a family of hot ones. The consigliere to Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, he represents the traditional way of doing things as an ally and advisor to Vito — the old-fashioned voice trying to calm the aggressive new generation of warriors like James Caan’s Sonny. When he’s the only one left that Michael can trust, he becomes the acting don, but even Tom is eventually betrayed. Duvall has a ton of unforgettable lines in his filmography, but near the top of the list is “Why do you hurt me, Michael? I’ve always been loyal to you.” To Tom Hagen, it’s never been just business. Going against him isn’t just going against reason and rationality; it’s going against history, allegiance, and family. Pacino, Caan, Brando, and De Niro arguably got more attention for these films, but they just don’t work without Duvall. —B.T.

Playwright Horton Foote had written the screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall’s film debut, as well as the script for The Chase, the Arthur Penn drama that marked the first time Duvall shared the screen with Marlon Brando. Foote and Duvall were already well acquainted with each other when the actor starred in Foote’s stage adaptation of a William Faulkner short story about a laconic sharecropper named Jackson Fentry who befriends a pregnant woman. When it came time to shoot a film version deep in the rural South, Duvall reprised the role — and while this modest, black-and-white indie may be the least-known title on this list, it’s definitely one of Duvall’s essential works. In an essay he wrote about Duvall for the book Close-Ups, Foote noted how spent weeks watching the New York actor slowly transform himself into “an inarticulate Mississippi tenant farmer,” and by the time he’d arrived on set, almost every trace of him had disappeared into the character. “He has that special ability to enter another culture,” the playwright noted, “to give himself to it and absorb it for creative use.” There are moments in Tomorrow when you don’t feel like you’re watching someone performing at all. —D.F.

Based on a Richard Stark crime novel, The Outfit is a gritty revenge masterpiece. In the film, Duvall plays Earl Macklin, a hardboiled ex-con with enough guts to take on a whole mafia family (the titular outfit) after they kill his brother. The Macklins had robbed a bank the Outfit operated and served time for doing so, but the way Earl sees it, the Outfit owes him a quarter of a million dollars — and he’s determined to collect on the sum however he can and take out anyone who gets in his way. Bloody, explosive, and intense, The Outfit captures Duvall’s knack for playing characters with unquenchable determination at the top of his game. —K.G.

In The Godfather, Robert Duvall played a character who swam with sharks, but even the Corleone family pales in comparison to the monsters who run network television. In Sidney Lumet’s Oscar-winning smackdown of evil corporations and the idiocy of the small screen, Duvall’s Frank Hackett is a ruthless executive at the struggling Union Broadcasting System who gets his prayers answered when his nighttime news anchor goes bonkers on camera, triggering a ratings juggernaut. Duvall’s ability to both simmer with rage and ooze superiority was perfectly wielded here, creating the definitive portrait of the soulless company man who values profits over everything else. Some of Network’s satirical targets haven’t aged well in 50 years, but the Frank Hacketts of the world have only multiplied. Duvall made the man utterly contemptible and absolutely unstoppable. —Tim Grierson

Everyone knows the line that became one of the most famous in the history of war movies: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” But there’s another one at the end of the same scene that also has a striking resonance: “Someday this war’s gonna end.” Duvall hits it with a sigh and something akin to a frown instead of optimism. It’s almost defeated resignation, as if his Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore isn’t sure he wants this chaos to end. He’ll miss the surfing, the soldiers, “Ride of the Valkyries,” and, yes, the smell of napalm. Duvall reportedly thought Kilgore was too exaggerated on the page (where he was named Colonel Carnage), and asked Coppola if he could do his own research to make the guy more genuine. And it’s that character work, the backstory and detail that’s there in every subtle beat, that makes this part so memorable. —B.T.

There are problematic screen dads, and then there’s Lt. “Bull” Meachum, the Marine pilot who runs his family with the same zero-tolerance, drop-and-give-me-20 attitude as a drill sergeant runs his platoon. Whether Duvall based any of his character’s military-man parenting style on his own upbringing — his own father was a rear admiral in the Navy, though Duvall claimed he was a lot more passive than Meachum — he certainly committed 100 percent to playing this patriarch without sanding down the rougher edges. Bull is especially hard on his eldest son Ben, played by Caddyshack’s Michael O’Keefe, and the scene in which a competitive one-on-one game ends with Dad bouncing a basketball off his boy’s head while taunting him is still hard to watch. (Ditto the scene where Bull tells Ben to take out a player on another team who’s fouled him, or he shouldn’t bother coming home.) The performance nabbed Duvall his first Best Actor Oscar nomination. He should have won. —D.F.

When Robert Duvall won Best Actor for his portrayal of faded country star Mac Sledge, he told the Academy Awards audience that he was especially honored that the giants of the music genre — including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings — thought so highly of his performance. “If I didn’t have that on one hand,” Duvall said, “I would feel that this on the other hand was not complete.” When making Tender Mercies, Duvall insisted that he do his own singing, even writing a few of Sledge’s songs. It was just one example of the authenticity and compassion he brought to his portrayal of a has-been musician laid low by addiction and personal failings who was determined to redeem himself. So often, Hollywood condescends to or mocks characters who live in the “real America,” but Duvall never allows Sledge to be a simplistic good ol’ boy or, conversely, a blandly saintly figure of pure virtue. It’s a tough, tender performance — and one of those rare cases when a great actor actually took home an Oscar for one of his best roles. — T.G.

Released a year after Lethal Weapon, this Dennis Hopper–directed film tackled the familiar ground of a hotshot rookie cop (in this case, Sean Penn) paired with a hardened veteran (Duvall), only with a more believable plot (these two are fighting gangs, not Lethal Weapon’s Gary Busey in a helicopter) and a better soundtrack (Ice-T!). At the time, Penn had cultivated an off-screen bad-boy image that seemed to define the role and played well against Duvall’s professionalism. Ultimately, Duvall stole the show in a scene where Penn’s character lusts after a fast-food server. “You heard the one about the two bulls?” Duvall asks, leading him to tell a parable anyone who’s seen the movie has never forgotten. —K.G.

Duvall said it took him 10 days to read Larry McMurty’s doorstopper of a novel, about two former Texas Rangers who embark on a cattle drive from the Lone Star State to Montana, and roughly 16 weeks to shoot the four-part TV adaptation. The impact it had on the actor, however, would last a lifetime, and he routinely referred to this miniseries as the highlight of his career well into his autumn years. Duvall had originally been offered the role of Captain Woodrow F. Call, the more straitlaced and upstanding of the duo. He reportedly told the producers that he’d already done a million variations on that type of cowboy and was more interested in playing the other part: Captain Gus McCrae, a gentleman with a love of good times, strong women, and even stronger liquor, provided the bartender serving it shows the proper amount of respect. It’s impossible now to think of anyone else playing this lawman — the same goes for Tommy Lee Jones, who’d end up steeping into Call’s dusty boots — and their pairing on the prairie is a big part of why Lonesome Dove’s fan base keeps growing with every generation. “The only healthy way to live, as I see it, is to love the little everyday things,” McCrae says in a moment of philosophical reflection. “Like a good whiskey, a soft bed, a glass of buttermilk. Or, say, a feisty gentleman like myself.” If you ever want to see grown men burst into tears, just show them the goodbye scene between the two old friends, which Duvall plays close to the vest yet still leaves you quietly wrecked. —D.F.

Roger Ebert once said that the movies that make him cry are “the films about goodness — about people acting bravely or generously in self-sacrifice.” Director Martha Coolidge’s hybrid of character study, memory play, and coming-of-age story Rambling Rose is one of the best examples of how Duvall could so deftly play goodness. His ability to project old-fashioned decency served him well in period pieces, his square jaw and classic Hollywood good looks never feeling anachronistic for films set generations ago. His presence adds veracity to this Great Depression tale of a prostitute (played by Laura Dern, in one of her best performances) who is taken in by a Southern family led by Duvall and Diane Ladd. Duvall’s patriarch, Buddy Hillyer, is a man who makes mistakes, but also one who knows right from wrong, a truth Duvall gets across with small gestures instead of big monologues. In a film in which Dern and Ladd got a lot of deserved attention, he’s the foundation of the ensemble. —B.T.

Duvall wrote, directed, financed, and starred in this 1997 tale of sin and redemption about a Pentecostal preacher who kills his wife’s lover, goes on the lam, and reinvents himself as the anonymous “Apostle E.F.” in the deep swamps of Louisiana. Duvall is electric as E.F., whether he’s preaching the word to his new congregation, administering last rites to a car-crash victim in a field, or beating the ass of — and later converting — a racist hell-bent on tearing down the E.F’s church. Duvall earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, mesmerizing audiences with a performance that, like those given by the best evangelists, was both charismatic and compassionate. “Preaching is one of the great American art forms. The rhythm, the cadence,” he told The New York Times in 1997. “And nobody knows about it except the preachers themselves.” —Joseph Hudak

Duvall spent much of the last few decades of his career showing up for glorified cameos that mainly called on him to play the embodiment of éminence grise gravitas. But he was given a gift by director Aaron Schneider in the form of Felix Bush, a recluse living in the hills of Tennessee. One day, Bush rides into town and invites the locals to attend his funeral. Never mind that he hasn’t gone to the Great Beyond just yet — the old man has decided to throw himself a pre-emptive wake. Duvall leans into the character’s cantankerous old-coot persona, and it’s a pleasure to see Duvall sink his teeth into a lead role again. Then comes his time to deliver a eulogy, and an entirely different side of Bush comes out. Over the course of a six-and-a-half minute monologue, we find out why this hermit feels he doesn’t belong to the community. The way that Duvall reveals someone unburdening their soul from decades of shame and regret is a powerful reminder of how he could turn a confessional speech into its own three-act play. Get Low gave him the opportunity for one last great performance in a career already filled with so many heights. —D.F.