Robert Duvall Jason Merritt/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Robert Duvall, the steely-eyed actor whose performances in the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, Lonesome Dove and The Apostle made him one of the finest actors of any generation, has died. He was 95. Duvall, who received an Academy Award - one of his seven Oscar nominations - for his performance as an alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), died Sunday at home on his Virginia ranch, his wife, Luciana, announced. "To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything," she said in a statement. "His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all. Thank you for the years of support you showed Bob and for giving us this time and privacy to celebrate the memories he leaves behind." Related Stories TV Shelly Desai, Actor on 'Men of a Certain Age' and 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' Dies at 90 Guest Column Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg Rewrote Hollywood's Rules in the Chaotic 70s. Who's Doing That Now? Duvall distinguished himself as an actor of major promise - even though he didn't have a line of dialogue - when he portrayed the reclusive Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Horton Foote, the film's screenwriter, personally recommended him for the role after seeing Duvall onstage in New York a few years earlier in Foote's The Midnight Caller. Foote was a major influence on Duvall; he also wrote the screenplays for Tender Mercies and another excellent Duvall film, Tomorrow (1972), and the actor starred in The Chase (1966), an adaptation of a Foote novel and play. So too was director Francis Ford Coppola, who first cast Duvall in The Rain People (1969), then hired him to play the trusted family lawyer Tom Hagen in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) and the surfing-crazy Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). Duvall's line in Apocalypse Now, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," became the stuff of movie legend. With jets flying overhead and shells exploding nearby, the scene, shot in the Philippines, was done, amazingly, in one take. "There wasn't any time to think," Duvall told Roger Ebert in 1983. "I heard over the intercom that we only had the use of the jets for 20 minutes. One flyby and that was it. I just got completely into the character, and if he wouldn't flinch, I wouldn't flinch." However, in a lifetime of great roles, Duvall's favorite was playing ex-Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae in the 1989 CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove, based on the Larry McMurtry Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. He got the part when James Garner, the first choice, said he wouldn't be able to ride a horse for long stretches. (Duvall, on the other hand, was an expert rider, having spent summers as a kid on his uncle's ranch in Montana.) "I walked into the wardrobe room one day on Lonesome Dove and said, 'Boys, we're making the Godfather of Westerns,'" he told Stephen Colbert in June 2021. "They were the two biggest things in the last part of the 20th century, I think." A private, unpretentious person who eschewed the Hollywood limelight, the longtime Virginia resident composed and performed his own country ballads for his character, Mac Sledge, in his understated Tender Mercies performance. Duvall also received Oscar noms for his work as Hagen and Kilgore and for portraying tough-as-nails Marine pilot Bull Meechum in The Great Santini (1979); for starring as Pentecostal preacher Eulis "Sonny" Dewey in The Apostle (1997), which he also wrote, sang in, directed and financed; for playing the vicious but somehow charming corporate lawyer Jerome Facher in A Civil Action (1998); and for appearing as small-town magistrate Joseph Palmer, the father of Robert Downey Jr.'s character, in The Judge (2015). As a quick-triggered outlaw, Duvall engaged John Wayne in a memorable shootout in True Grit (1969), and he stood out as the incompetent Major Frank Burns in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), as an automaton in George Lucas' THX 1138 (1971) and as Mississippi cotton farmer Jackson Fentry in Tomorrow. He played Dr. Watson in The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1976), a ruthless TV executive in Network (1976), a sportswriter in The Natural (1984) and a NASCAR crew chief in Days of Thunder (1990). As cops, he was in his element in The Detective (1968), True Confessions (1981) and Colors (1988). More recently, Duvall starred as a Texas rancher in the family drama Wild Horses (2015), appeared in an adaptation of John St