Robert Duvall
Robert Duvall
Robert Selden Duvall is an American actor and director. He has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and has multiple nominations and one win each of the BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Emmy Award. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2005. He has starred in some of the most acclaimed and popular films and television series of all time, including To Kill a Mockingbird, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Bullitt, True Grit, MASH,...
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 January 1931
CitySan Diego, CA
Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love... true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.
You gotta be careful with message movies. People say "What do you want people to take away from it?" I always say its totally individual.
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.
Well, it's like my movie, 'The Apostle.' Some people in the North don't get that movie. They think that, in the South, if you don't shout, you can't play one of those guys.
Too many people think that economics is this subject that should wait until the university level. But it can't wait that long.
It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre.
I don't have many people showing up at my door. Very few people come out. When they do, I get a little suspicious. I live way up on a hill, way, way back in the country.
I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can't predict.
You really have to soak up the culture of the people to get it right. If you're making a fiction film, it's entertainment, but you want it to be as real as possible.
Some people say, 'Do you have any theories on acting?' And I say, well maybe: I think you can start with zero and end with zero. You don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to go for the result.
We either accept weaknesses in good people or we have to tear pages out of the Bible.
You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.
At one point, they wanted me at the end wounded, and in a wheelchair and crutch like Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall. I said I'm not doing that movie.
It's cheap and it's ranch country. I like the sight of the mountains.