Duvall was born in San Diego in 1931, the son of a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy and an amateur actress; through his mother, he was reportedly related to Robert E. Lee, whom he would later play in the 2003 film Gods and Generals. Maybe the apex of this style for Duvall was his work as the terrifying but impotent Marine veteran Bull Meechum in The Great Santini (for which he received his third Oscar nomination), who channels his rage at his family when he doesn’t have a war to fight in. The Apostle in 1997 was something of a leading-role comeback, a dark independent film that Duvall wrote and directed and that seemed to owe as much to the Sundance generation of the ’90s as to Duvall’s New Hollywood of the ’70s.
Author: David Sims
Published at: 2026-02-16 23:01:00
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