All All. Sign In. The Best Actor List activity. Robert Duvall. Actor Producer Director The Apostle Duvall majored in drama at Principia College Elsah, IL , then served a two-year hitch in the army after graduating in Bill in , studying under Sanford Meisner along with Dustin Hoffman , with whom Duvall shared an apartment. Both were close to another struggling young actor named Gene Hackman. Duvall began making a name for himself as a stage actor in New York, winning an Obie Award in playing incest-minded longshoreman "Eddie Carbone" in the off-Broadway revival of Arthur Miller 's "A View from the Bridge", a production for which his old roommate Hoffman was assistant director.
He was also memorable as the heavy who is shot by John Wayne at the climax of True Grit and was the first "Maj. He received the first of his six Academy Award nominations for the role. Occasionally this actor's actor got the chance to assay a lead role, most notably in Tomorrow , in which he was brilliant as William Faulkner 's inarticulate backwoods farmer.
He was less impressive as the lead in Badge , in which he played a character based on real-life NYPD detective Eddie Egan , the same man his old friend Gene Hackman had won an Oscar for playing, in fictionalized form as "Popeye Doyle" in The French Connection It was his appearance as "Lt.
Kilgore" in another Coppola picture, Apocalypse Now , that solidified Duvall's reputation as a great actor. He got his second Academy Award nomination for the role, and was named by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most versatile actor in the world.
Duvall created one of the most memorable characters ever assayed on film, and gave the world the memorable phrase, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!
