Farewell to Robert Duvall, a Cinema Legend

The great Robert Duvall, one of the most authoritative interpreters of American cinema, has passed away at 95. The actor died at his ranch in Virginia; the news was confirmed by his wife Luciana.

An Actor of Immense Stature

With over sixty years of career, Duvall traversed Hollywood and its transformations without ever losing rigor and measure. After his big screen debut in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), he definitively established himself as Tom Hagen, "consigliere" in The Godfather saga, becoming one of the iconic faces of 1970s cinema.

Unforgettable as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination and immortalized the famous line about napalm. In 1984, he won the statuette for Best Actor for Tender Mercies, confirming a versatility capable of transitioning from military power to intimate fragility. This writer met him in Venice in 1985, when he accompanied Jerzy Skolimowski in the dramatic The Lightship, a work that received the Special Jury Prize.

Among his most beloved works are also the miniseries Lonesome Dove, in which he portrayed ranger Augustus McCrae, and works like The Apostle (1997), the latter written and directed by himself. To discover his immense talent, the advice is to seek out other works, perhaps not all as flashy but immense in terms of acting caliber: Nazi officer in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), TV boss in Network (1976).

A tough and impulsive policeman in True Confessions (1981), a veteran policeman in Colors (1988), a racist policeman in Badge 373 (1973), a disillusioned policeman in Falling Down (1993), a sportswriter in The Natural (1984), a rancher alongside Kevin Costner in Open Range (2003), a newspaper editor in The Paper (1994), and certainly not least as a judge in the father-son drama with Robert Downey Jr. in The Judge (2014).

Away from the worldly spotlight, he embodied an idea of acting founded on subtraction and authenticity. With his passing, Hollywood loses a silent but central protagonist, capable of leaving a profound mark without ever raising his voice.