UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

Excerpts. From NYTIMES

Robert Duvall, who drew from a seemingly bottomless reservoir of acting craftsmanship to transform himself into a business-focused Mafia lawyer, a faded country singer, a cynical police detective, a bullying Marine pilot, a surfing-obsessed Vietnam commander, a mysterious Southern recluse and scores of other film, stage and television characters, died on Sunday. He was 95.

His death was announced in a statement by his wife, Luciana Duvall, who said he had died at home. She gave no other details. He had long lived on a sprawling horse farm in The Plains, in Fauquier County, Va., west of Washington.

Mr. Duvall’s singular trait was to immerse himself in roles so deeply that he seemed to almost disappear into them — an ability that was “uncanny, even creepy the first time” it was witnessed, said Bruce Beresford, the Australian who directed him in the 1983 film “Tender Mercies.”
ImageA man in a suit stands and grins while holding an Academy Award.
Mr. Duvall backstage after winning the Academy Award for best actor in April 1984.Credit...Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images
In that film, Mr. Duvall played Mac Sledge, a boozy, washed-up country star who comes to terms with life through marriage to a widow with a young son. The performance earned him an Academy Award for best actor, his sole Oscar in a career that brought him six other nominations in both leading and supporting roles.
“He is the character,” Mr. Beresford said of Sledge. “He’s not Duvall at all.”

Mr. Duvall, though, wasn’t buying it. “What do you mean?” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1989. “I don’t become the character! It’s still me — doing myself, altered.”

Audiences and reviewers remained unconvinced. For them, Mr. Duvall, with a voice far from silky and features falling more than a few degrees short of movie-star handsome, effectively became someone entirely new, time and again.


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/movies/robert-duvall-dead.html