Robert Duvall was a distinguished and prolific screen actor who lent a brooding intensity and grizzled authority to seven decades of American film-making.
Nominated for Academy Awards on seven occasions, he won best actor for his role as a troubled country singer in 1983’s Tender Mercies.
His many other roles included a mafia consigliere in The Godfather, a bombastic army officer in Apocalypse Now, and a Texas Ranger-turned-cattle driver in Lonesome Dove.
More character actor than leading man, he could be relied upon to inject a feisty, fiery machismo and a cantankerous contrariness into the most mainstream Hollywood offering.
Born Robert Selden Duvall in January 1931 in San Diego, California, Duvall was a self-proclaimed “navy brat” due to his father’s life-long career in the United States Navy.
His father expected him to follow him into the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Yet his son instead served two years in the army following his 1953 college graduation.
