Remembering actor Robert Duvall & filmmaker Frederick Wiseman

This is Fresh Air. I'm David B.Chuley. Robert Duval, the Oscar-winning actor whose roles in both blockbuster movies and small independent films were equally powerful and memorable, died Sunday. He was 95 years old. Born in San Diego in 1931, Duval studied acting in New York City alongside such other future stars as Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and James Conn.

Duval was performing at Long Island's Gateway Playhouse when screenwriter Horton Foote saw him and recommended him for a part in the movie Foote was adapting. The movie was to kill a mockingbird, and Robert Duval was indeed cast in his first screen role as the silent but haunting Boo Radley. Duval was thirty one years old, but never stopped working afterward in film and TV. His last two credits were in 2022, six decades later. Duval's contributions to film were constant and indelible.

The characters he played were passionate, intense, and often combative. Tom Hagen, the conciliary and the Godfather, earned Duval his first Oscar nomination. The role of the napalm loving lieutenant colonel in Apocalypse Now earned him his second. Eventually, Duval won a Best Actor Academy Award for playing a country singer in Tender Mercies, but whether or not his roles garnered nominations or awards, they certainly made their mark with audiences. He played the uptight doctor Frank Burns in Robert Altman's original movie version of MASH, the ruthless TV executive in Patty Chaevsky's Network, a cynical sports writer in The Natural opposite Robert Redford, and the abusive father in The Great Santini.

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