Robert Duvall, Chameleonic Veteran of Stage and Screen, Dies at 95

Widely regarded as one of finest actors of his generation, Academy Award winner Robert Duvall died in Virginia on February 15, 2026. His death was announced by his wife Luciana Pedraza Duvall, who did not reveal the cause of death. 

Duvall was born on January 5, 1931 in San Diego, the son of a rear admiral and an actress, and discovered his knack for performance while attending Principia College in Illinois. He moved to New York in the mid-1950s, where he honed his acting skills at Sanford Meisner’s famed Neighborhood Playhouse. It was during this time that Duvall roomed with Dustin Hoffman in a sixth-floor apartment and was close friends with another aspiring actor, Gene Hackman. Reflecting on his time as an acting student later in his career, Duvall told the Los Angeles Times, “I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making something out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft–using yourself to create a character.”

Before making his 1958 off-Broadway debut in George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, Duvall was already something of a theater veteran, having starred in productions of Picnic, I Am a Camera and A Streetcar Named Desire at Gateway Playhouse, an equity theater company in Long Island. He further established himself in New York’s theater scene through leading roles in Michael Shurtleff's Call Me by My Rightful Name (which co-starred dance legend Alvin Ailey) and William Snyder's The Days and Nights of BeeBee Fenstermaker off-Broadway.

For his performance as the immigrant dockworker Eddie Carbone in a 1965 off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, Duvall won an Obie Award. The following year, he made his Broadway debut opposite Lee Remick in Frederick Knott’s psychological thriller Wait Until Dark. Duvall would not return to Broadway until 1977, starring in David Mamet’s American Buffalo.

Starting with his first big screen outing as misunderstood recluse Boo Radley in the 1962 film adaptation of Harper Lee’s literary classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall launched a robust film career. He worked with director Frances Ford Coppola in the 1967 road drama The Rain People, marking the beginning of one of the most fruitful collaborations of his career. In 1969, Duvall went toe-to-toe with John Wayne in the classic Western True Grit and played an incompetent Army major a year later in Robert Altman’s irreverent war comedy M*A*S*H. He followed this up with George Lucas’ directorial debut THX 1138 in 1971. The 1970s also yielded a memorable performance as a television executive in the Paddy Chayefsky-penned classic Network, an Oscar-nominated turn as a volatile marine in The Great Santini and President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the miniseries Ike.

Duvall’s work with Coppola spawned bonafide classics like The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and the Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now. As chaos agent Lt. Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, he delivered the iconic line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

After a string of nominations, Duvall finally won an Oscar in 1983 for Tender Mercies, showing off his singing chops as an alcoholic country singer. Later in the decade, he won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the miniseries Lonesome Dove, where he played a former Texas Ranger fielding the Wild West. In 1998, he earned another Oscar nomination as a Pentecostal preacher grappling with his faith in The Apostle, a film that he wrote, directed and financed.

Other notable film credits include Days of Thunder, Secondhand Lions and Disney’s Newsies, where he played newspaper bigwig Joseph Pulitzer. The latter became a favorite among musical theater fans and spawned a successful stage adaptation on Broadway. He starred alongside Tom Cruise in the 2012 action blockbuster Jack Reacher and received his final Oscar nomination for a supporting performance in the 2014 legal drama The Judge.

Duvall kept working well into his eighties, playing a corrupt power broker in Steve McQueen’s 2018 neo-noir Widows. His last two films, Hustle and The Pale Blue Eye, were both released on Netflix in 2022. Reflecting on his indomitable work ethic in a late-career interview with Esquire, Duvall said, "I’ve done a lot of crap, but I’ve done a lot of good stuff, too. You always wish there was one more. It’s like the great jumping-horse riders−always looking for a horse, the horse."