“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.” –quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1993.

Virginia resident Robert Duvall is considered by many to be among the finest actors of our time (Vincent Canby of The New York Times called him the ‘American Laurence Olivier’). The son of a Navy admiral, Duvall served in the US Army and drew from this background to play many memorable military characters, including Major Frank Burns in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Apocalypse Now, 1979) and career military man Bull Meechum (The Great Santini, 1980). He also portrayed Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Gods and Generals (2003), a particularly appropriate role since Duvall is a descendant of Lee on his mother’s side. Some portions of that film were shot on the actor’s Virginia estate, and he has found actual Civil War battle remnants on his property.

Duvall has played a wide variety of Southern parts (an affinity perhaps owing to his father’s Virginia roots), beginning with Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), Tomorrow (1972, regarded by many as the best film adaptation of a William Faulkner work), faded country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies (1983, which Duvall also co-produced and for which he won the Best Actor Oscar). Other pictures in his Southern oeuvre include Rambling Rose (1991) and Sling Blade, among others.

Duvall’s earliest Hollywood success was as Tom Hagen, valued ‘consigliari’ and adopted son of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). In 1975, the multi-faceted actor added director to his title with the award-winning documentary We’re Not the Jet Set, about a Nebraska rodeo family. He made his feature directorial debut with the engaging Angelo, My Love (1983), a well-received portrait of New York Gypsy life in which he used many nonprofessional actors, but his third time behind the camera was truly charmed as he earned well-deserved accolades for The Apostle (1997), which will screen at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

In 2002, Duvall sat once again in the director’s chair to write, produce, and star in Assassination Tango, a gritty crime thriller that uniquely incorporated his love of Argentinian tango dancing as well as dense character study.

Duvall’s early triumphs were on stage; at the beginning of his career, he worked often with his friends and roommates Gene hackman and Dustin Hoffman. He played recognizable characters in such classic TV shows as The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, Route 66, and The Defenders. Returning to the small screen again after his motion picture success, the actor has played such diverse historical characters as Eisenhower, Stalin and Eichmann. His most memorable television appearance was probably retired Texas Ranger Captain Augustus ‘Gus’ McCrae in the CBS miniseries adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1989). The actor has lent his rugged majesty to other Western characters in Kevin Costner’s Open Range (2003) and, most recently, AMC’s Broken Trail (2006).