Robert Duvall (Actor)

"Mr. Duvall is a very special actor in that he doesn't have to be noisily [or even quietly] busy to assert his control over character and the audience's attention. The camera sees everything he does, which, when one tries to describe it, seems to be nothing at at all. The behavior becomes somehow riveting." --Vincent Canby in his The New York Times review of "Convicts", December 6, 1991

"Stripping away artifice--it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life--but there's nothing bigger than life." --Duvall in Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1993

"You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. D'you know, one time we had a hail bomb, for 12 hours. When it was all over I walked up ... we didn't find one of 'em, not one stinking dead body. The smell. You know that, that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smells like ... victory." --Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore [Duvall] from "Apocalypse Now"

About the experience: " ... 'Apocalypse Now' took so long to come out, it was almost anticlimactic when it did. [Coppola] left a scene out, which I felt made it more complete: I save a baby's life. I've killed the parents, and I send it back in my helicopter to be dealt with at the hospital. Then for some reason they cut it out. Maybe in a longer version it'll be back in again." --Duvall to Empire. July 1998

"You're always looking for a way into the part. I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft--using yourself to create a character." --Robert Duvall to Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1998

Duvall claims to be related to Robert E. Lee (way back) on his mother's side. His paternal grandfather's name was Abraham Lincoln Duvall.

On his auteur turn with "The Apostle": "It's been accepted by the secular hip community--the film people--and by the religious people as well [Billy Graham called it 'a compass pointing toward the 21st century'], and they're the toughest. I feel I'm a better person for making the movie; there's a certain sense of accomplishment that maybe I've made something that matters." --Robert Duvall to the London Times, June 3, 1998