The first time I read the phrase “an actor’s actor” about the great Robert Duvall was in the first issue of “American Film” magazine that I subscribed, way back in the Dark Ages when there magazines.
It’s not as though he was unheralded before he followed “The Great Santini” with “True Confessions.” But his emergence, nearly 20 years after an iconic cameo in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and years after holding his own in the all-star “Godfather” movies and then stealing “Apocalypse Now” as curtain call for Coppola, still seemed sudden.
Balding, serious-seeming even when he was being funny — which was rare — he was a generational talent, a character actor of range whose unfussy technique seemed a grand contrast to Brando or Pacino or his Actor’s Studio classmate Dustin Hoffman. De Niro must have gne to school on Duvall’s acting.
He had presence rivaling Sidney Poitier, Hackman or Gregory Peck, and he turned it and that “actor’s actor” label in an Oscar and a career that often saw him as a tipping point in terms of casting.
Sign yourself some “names,” rising stars or old timers with no more box office appeal, add Duvall to class the joint up and Jeff Bridges gets his Oscar for “Crazy Heart” and Bill Murray came close one last time in “Get Low” because Duvall got the project made. “Sling Blade?” Ask Billy Bob about how landing Duvall became a life changing event for him and an indie film turned motion picture “event” in cinema history.
A military brat and San Diego native, he became an adoptive Southerner who played a string of iconic characters in films with Southern settings — Alabama and Arkansas to Texas, “Lonesome Dove” and “Tender Mercies” (his Oscar winner), “Broken Trail” and “Open Range” to “A Family Thing” and “The Apostle.”
At times, it seemed as if he was putting on an acting clinic, committing to celluloid an understated way of finding the emotional truth of a character, a scene and the movie the envelopes them. This moment in “Tender Mercies” is going to be rewatched by those in the know more than a few times over the next day or two, and until the end of cinema as we know.
At home on a horse for much of the “famous” and “icon” part of his career, he moved to Virginia horse country and stayed in the saddle years past any comparable Western star. Who wouldn’t?
Rewatching “The Godfather” films you see the quintessential Duvall performance emerge — quiet, with flashes of temper. That upside down smile he flashed as Col. Kilgore or the soulless “Network” functionary became shorthand for a character’s sadism — or just someone not shy about laughing at a joke only he got.
They only gave him one Oscar? Silly Academy.
I interviewed him many times over the years, because one does NOT turn down a studio’s pitch of a chat with the “actor’s actor.” He was always quiet, serious, modest and self-effacing. The only jokes one ever heard from him were in screenplays in movies like “Second Hand Lions” and “A Night in Old Mexico,” or any time he needed to make uptight Tommy Lee Jones a little less of an entitled Yale man (“Lonesome Dove”).
Our most memorable and revealing chat came when he was promoting his then-new film — “Assassination Tango” — and his then new and much younger new wife and tango partner, Luciana Pedraza. He wanted and almost needed that movie to work and we spent a long lunch in Miami discussing the dance, the “assassin” cliche and his new life.
The star vehicle he directed, at Billy Bob’s urging, “The Apostle,” might be his very finest performance — a searing depiction of honesty and hypocrisy and the search for salvation between those two poles. He broke Southern Protestantism and Southern “types” down like a New Deal sociologist sent “back home” to study the folks he’d come to know through his work.
But he was just as great to talk with right after speaking to another now-passed icon, James Earl Jones, for their folksy and flinty take on the silliness of the Southern obsession with “race” — “A Family Thing.” Duvall was brittle in the movie, rarely warmer in talking about it and the chance to act with Jones. That’s one I may have to rewarch tonight.
I loved most of the movies he made, and cherished any excuse I’ve had I’d to rewatch “Rambling Rose” or “Tender Mercies” or his turns in Westerns. He made it to 95 years of age, a fine seasoning for the greatest actor most of us will ever see to achieve.
Adios, pardner. And well done.
