by WorldTribune Staff, February 17, 2026 Real World News

Acting legend and Oscar winner Robert Duvall passed away on Sunday at his home in northern Virginia’s horse country. He was 95.

Duvall, whose characters and films often featured the relentless clash between good and evil, had been nominated for seven Oscar awards over the course of his career, winning one in 1984 for his starring role in “Tender Mercies”. He also won one BAFTA, two Emmys, four Golden Globes, and one Screen Actors Guild award.

Born on January 5, 1931, Duvall served two years in the Army during the Korean War. Upon his return, he studied drama and appeared in numerous Broadway and off-Broadway plays, as well as made guest TV appearances, before making his film debut at the age of 31 with his role in “To Kill a Mockingbird” in 1962.

The iconic line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” was spoken by Duvall in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now”. He delivered the line while playing the character Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore during a scene where he surveys a bombed-out beach.

Duvall’s role as Corleone family attorney Tom Hagen in “The Godfather” brought his first Oscar nomination, a role that was expanded upon in The Godfather Part II. He said in 2010, “It always comes back to ‘The Godfather.’ The first ones are two of the best films ever made. About a quarter of the way into it, we knew we had something special.”

Duvall also portrayed a ruthless news executive in “Network” (1976), Tom Cruise’s NASCAR crew chief in “Days of Thunder” (1990) and a Pentecostal preacher in “The Apostle” (1997), a film he also wrote and directed.

Duvall was particularly drawn to the western, a genre he returned to repeatedly throughout his career. As the outlaw “Lucky” Ned Pepper, he went up against John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit” (1969); he portrayed a cattleman alongside Kevin Costner in “Open Range” (2003); and saw his star rise exponentially as former Texas Ranger Augustus “Gus” McCrae in the hit TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove” (1989) — based on the novel by Larry McMurtry—which he called his favorite role.

“That’s my ‘Hamlet,’ ” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2014. “The English have Shakespeare; the French, Molière. In Argentina, they have Borges, but the western is ours.”

The Wall Street Journals cited tributes from several critics:

…. Duvall made his film debut as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1962). “God gave [Duvall] certain attributes,” Horton Foote, who won Academy Awards for writing the scripts for “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Tender Mercies,” told the New York Times in 1989. “He was born with an extraordinary ear [for] the specifics of an accent and the characteristics of a character. His sense of hearing, his sense of observation are extremely acute. He absorbs himself, not intellectually but viscerally, in his roles. He does his homework more thoroughly than any actor I’ve ever known, and I’ve known many actors.”

…. “He’s a brilliantly realistic actor, and I think the reason he isn’t even more prominent in the public eye is that he came along at a time when film construction became so disheveled that a film needed a vaudevillian to hold it together,” the film critic Andrew Sarris told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “He won’t overplay. De Niro has a fantastic reputation, but he’s uneven. Duvall is subtler and better.”

…. “Duvall’s aging face, a road map of dead ends and dry gulches, can accommodate rage or innocence or any ironic shade in between,” the film critic Richard Corliss wrote in Time magazine.

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