The long-time C&I reader favorite passed away Sunday at age 95.
Of course we knew the day would come eventually. After all, when someone reaches 95, you can’t help fearing that their days, however well-spent, are numbered. Still, there was something about the great Robert Duvall that made many of us think he was immortal. Or so we hoped.
Alas, the beloved Oscar-winning actor and frequent C&I cover star passed away Sunday at home on his Virginia horse farm. His wife Luciana broke the news on social media.
As is our custom at Cowboys & Indians, we prefer not to mourn deaths, but to celebrate lives. So we’re sharing some memories about Duvall, and some of the movies and TV projects that really will ensure for him a kind of immortality. Remember: A man may die, but his films remain forever in the present tense.
In Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), actor Brian Cox delivers one of the most shattering final lines in movie history when he caps off his hopeful description of an alternative reality for his wayward son by saying: “This life came so close to never happening.” Those words came back to haunt us when Robert Duvall reminded us in 2014 that he almost didn’t get to play what has long been recognized as his signature role: the former Texas Ranger, newly minted cattle driver, and irrepressible rapscallion Augustus “Gus” McCrae, in Lonesome Dove.
During preproduction for the epic 1989 miniseries, another costar — and an equally formidable rival — was considered by the producers. “My agent then was handling James Garner, who was the first one they offered it to,” Duvall recalled. “So I told them: ‘If you can get James Garner to change parts with me, then I’ll be interested.’ Well, they came back and said, ‘He’s got health issues. He can’t be on a horse for six to eight weeks.’ So I got the part.”
Duvall has many other classic films and TV productions on his lengthy resume — like, you know, The Godfather. And Apocalypse Now. And Network. And M*A*S*H. “But just about wherever else I go,” he told us, “everyone wants to talk about Lonesome Dove. Everybody wants to talk about Gus McCrae, my favorite part.”
And sometimes that can come in quite handy. When we spoke with him about A Night in Old Mexico for our February/March 2014 cover story, Duvall described such a situation.
“Let me tell you my favorite Texas story,” he said. “My wife and I were driving from Austin to the Perini Ranch Steakhouse in Buffalo Gap. We’ve done it twice. And twice, she made the wrong turn. So now we’re going down the highway, headed toward Waco. And I tell her, ‘You’re going the wrong way.’ And she comes from a family of race car drivers in northern Argentina, so she’s going about 90 miles an hour. It looks like there’s nobody else around. And then, all of a sudden, here comes a state trooper. He pulls us over. And he starts to say, ‘Ma’am, do you know how fast...’ And then he sees me, and he goes: ‘I don’t believe it! Lonesome Dove! Follow me!’
“So we follow him back to where we should have turned. He gets on the phone, calls his wife and kids, and they come out to meet us. We talk, we take pictures, this and that. And then he tells me, ‘OK, this is the way you should go.’ And before we left, I made a joke. I said, ‘If we cross that double line, you’re not going to give me a ticket, are you?’ And without losing a beat, his wife said, ‘Well, if he does, he won’t be allowed in my bed tonight.’”
We celebrated Duvall’s career today by looking back at seven of his most notable films. Our favorite: Tender Mercies, the classic 1983 drama propelled by Duvall’s Oscar-winning and profoundly affecting performance. Masterfully directed by Bruce Beresford, this is a spare, subtle film that speaks in a quiet yet compelling voice about faith and despair, regret and redemption, lower depths and second chances, while considering the restorative potential of human and divine love. Duvall is absolutely heart-wrenching in his portrayal of Mac Sledge, a down-and-out country singer who’s redeemed by the love a good woman (Tess Harper), then pushed back to the brink by a devastating tragedy.
“Robert Duvall’s performance as Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies took my breath away,” actress JoeBeth Williams wrote in a 2019 essay for Backstage, “and embodied what I consider the ultimate goal of an actor: to simply live in the skin of the character. To let go of one's own ego — which wants to show out, be noticed, make everyone see how amazing one is — and to humbly embody the soul of the character one is playing.
“Mr. Duvall made me forget there was an actor on screen: He simply was a broken-down country boy trying to find his way out of his failures and back into grace. Coming from Texas, I had seen many men like Mac — had passed them on the streets, seen them stumbling out of bars, seen their pickups stalled by the side of the road. And I felt a connection with that man on screen so deep it vibrated inside me; it squeezed my heart.”
The enduringly amazing thing about Robert Duvall was the remarkable diversity of his performances. In addition to his work in the aforementioned films, he played everything from a cross-dressing Jesse James (The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid) to a savvy corporate attorney (A Civil Action), from a tough-loving father (The Great Santini) to a supportive Dr. Watson aiding Nicol Williamson’s troubled Sherlock Holmes (The Seven-Per-Cent-Solution), from an eccentric recluse who decies to stage his own funeral before he dies (Get Low) to the hard-charging editor-in-chief at a failing newspaper (The Paper), from a guilt-ridden evangelist (The Apostle) to an aging jurist dealing with health issues as he stands accused of murder (The Judge, which earned Duvall his last of seven Oscar nominations).
Sissy Spacek, Duvall’s costar in the delightful 2002 period drama Get Low, admiringly said, ‘He's such an amazing actor that he simply is the character. He doesn’t act the character, he becomes the character. And so, really, when you’re working with Bobby, you just have to react. It’s that easy. You just show up, and he’s like this engine. All you have to do is catch this moving train. You get a great ride when you work with Bobby.’”
Duvall graced our cover — again — when we spoke with him for our May/June 2020 issue about the lifetime achievement honor he received during the Western Heritage Awards at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. In the course of our conversation, he shared a story about working with director Walter Hill on Geronimo: An American Legend (1993).
“[T]hat was interesting,” Duvall said, “because he called me back to reshoot a scene, to kill me. [Laughs.] I said, ‘Look, I’ve died enough.’ I’d already ridden off into the sunset. But then they decided that the movie needed a death scene, so they brought me back for that, and it worked out OK. In fact, after [Geronimo] came out, I got a letter from [Marlon] Brando. Of course, we all looked up to him so much, so very much. And he wrote in the letter how much he was moved by that death scene. So there you go. You never know.”
Five years ago, Duvall invited CBS talk show host Stephen Colbert to his Virginia home to talk about Lonesome Dove (of course), Network (one of Colbert’s favorite films) — and 12 Mighty Orphans, the then-new film in which he was united, fleetingly, with his Apocalypse Now co-star Martin Sheen. (The fact-based drama, not incidentally, was voted Best Film of 2021 in balloting for the fifth annual C&I Movie Awards.) You can see some highlights from their conversation here.
If you catch Duvall in the 2022 Netflix period thriller The Pale Blue Eye — his last screen credit — you’ll see that he makes absolutely every second count in his two scenes with an effortlessly attention-grabbing performance as Jean Pepe, a scholar of the supernatural arts who provides invaluable information to two men investigating a horrible crime at West Point in 1830: Renowned detective Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) and an eccentric cadet the world soon would know as Edgar Alan Poe (Harry Melling). Duvall admiringly described the film as “mighty.” We would say the same thing about Robert Duvall himself.
