Robert Duvall, who played the smooth mafia lawyer in The Godfather and stole the show with his depiction of a surfing-crazed colonel in Apocalypse Now, has died at the age of 95, his wife said on Monday.
His death on Sunday was confirmed by his wife, Luciana Duvall.
“Yesterday we said goodbye to my beloved husband, cherished friend, and one of the greatest actors of our time. Bob passed away peacefully at home,” she wrote.
Photo: AP
Blunt-talking, prolific and glitz-averse, Robert Duvall won an Oscar for best actor and was nominated six other times. Over his six decades-long career, he shone in both lead and supporting roles, and eventually became a director. He kept acting in his 90s.
“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” Luciana Duvall said. “His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal and holding court.”
Robert Duvall won his Academy Award in 1983 for playing a washed-up country singer in Tender Mercies, but his most memorable characters also included the soft-spoken, loyal mob consigliere Tom Hagen in the first two installments of The Godfather and the maniacal Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now.
“It was an honor to have worked with Robert Duvall,” Oscar winner Al Pacino, who acted alongside Robert Duvall in The Godfather films, said in a statement. “He was a born actor as they say, his connection with it, his understanding and his phenomenal gift will always be remembered. I will miss him.”
As Kilgore, Duvall earned an Oscar nomination and became a bona fide star after years playing lesser roles, in a performance where he utters what is now one of cinema’s most famous lines.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” his war-loving character — bare chested, cocky and sporting a big black cowboy hat — muses as low-flying US warplanes bomb a beachfront tree line where he wants to go surfing.
Coppola called the loss of Robert Duvall “a blow.”
“Such a great actor and such an essential part of American Zoetrope from its beginning,” Coppola said in a statement on Instagram.
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