Robert Duvall famously portrayed a tough father in the 1979 film “The Great Santini,” in which he was a demandingly aggressive Marine pilot who was brutal to his teenage son.
In “The Judge,” the new film from David Dobkin, he plays another difficult parent, a craggy rural Indiana jurist named Joseph Palmer, whose wife’s death forces him to deal with his estranged son, Hank (Robert Downey Jr.).
Growing up, the judge had been especially hard on Hank, who has never forgiven him. Now, he’s a successful defense attorney in Chicago, who, unlike his letter-of-the-law dad, does what it takes to get criminals off.
“We waited quietly 20 years for you,” Duvall’s Joseph Palmer tells his son Hank as a way of explaining why he hadn’t called him before his mother’s death.
The 83-year-old actor says he added the word “quietly.”
“ ‘Quietly’ gave me something of vulnerability,” Duvall says, explaining his approach to acting. “You’re always looking for different ways to keep it truthful, personal.”
If anyone should know about keeping acting fresh, it’s Duvall, whose own success would have been considered unlikely when he started in the 1950s. Born in San Diego in 1931, his father Howard was a naval officer who rose to the rank of rear admiral, and Duvall lived in a number of cities growing up before landing in Annapolis, Md.
When he started foundering at a small college in Illinois, his parents urged him toward acting as a way of graduating. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” he says. “I needed to get through, and it worked because I got my first A.”
He went into the Army after school and then moved to New York City on the G.I. Bill to pursue acting.
There he hooked up with a couple of other aspiring thespians — Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, whom he roomed with. Out of all the struggling stage actors in the city at the time, no one — including themselves — would predict that the three would all turn out to be best-actor Oscar winners with long, illustrious careers. Not that they didn’t struggle for a while, working menial jobs and taking the few roles that came their way.
Duvall was in his 30s when his friend, playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, suggested him for the role of the frightening but gentle Boo Radley in the 1962 film “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
Still, parts were not always easy to come by for the next decade as his reputation slowly grew, going mostly between television and stage. As the villain, he was killed by John Wayne at the end of the original 1969 “True Grit.” “I didn’t like that much,” says Duvall. “Some of those old-time directors were hard to work with,” he adds, referring to veteran filmmaker Henry Hathaway.
He made two minor films with pal James Caan — “Countdown” (1967), an astronaut film directed by Robert Altman, and “The Rain People” (1969) by Francis Ford Coppola. Then in 1970, Altman would cast Duvall in the key part of Bible-thumping but licentious Maj. Frank Burns in the unlikely smash hit “M*A*S*H.” Two years later, Coppola put him in “The Godfather” as Tom Hagen, the Corleone adopted son and lawyer, and suddenly everyone knew who Robert Duvall was.
In the next 10 years, he was featured in “The Godfather: Part II,” “Network,” “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” “The Eagle Has Landed,” two major TV miniseries about Dwight D. Eisenhower as the general, “The Great Santini,” “True Confessions” with Robert De Niro, and “Apocalypse Now” as surfing Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, who uttered the immortal line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
He won his Oscar for playing a down-and-out country singer in “Tender Mercies” (1983), and was a cynical sportswriter in “The Natural.” In 1989, he endeared himself to millions of Americans in the hit TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove” as the irascible Augustus “Gus” McCrae opposite Tommy Lee Jones’ Woodrow F. Call.
In 1998, Duvall hooked up again with Altman for the film “The Gingerbread Man,” which also starred Robert Downey Jr. Although the two were in a couple of scenes together, they had no real dialogue.
“I remember him seeming lost. He was going through some things,” says Duvall. “But whatever he went through, he’s come through it with bells on.”
It’s now widely known Downey was struggling with drug problems in the late 1990s and even ended up doing a year in prison.
The duo are back together on the big screen for “The Judge.” To get familiar with each other, Dobkin had Duvall, Downey and Vincent D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong, who play the rest of the Palmer family, do about 90 minutes of improv before starting filming, which Duvall says he found helpful.
Duvall says he was attracted to the role in “The Judge” because he “liked how the character had so many sides. He had his virtues and he had his vices. It was written very smartly,” says Duvall. “But I didn’t study judges or anything. I followed my instincts once again, not here (pointing to his head) but here (pointing to his heart).”
He believes he and Downey approach acting in a similar fashion. “I may have been a tough father, but he was a tough son, too,” he says.
Duvall, who lives in Virginia, has just finished directing “Wild Horses,” a Western that he says cost $2.2 million and was shot in 23 days in Utah. It stars James Franco and Josh Hartnett. Duvall recruited some ex-lawmen to play Texas Rangers, as well as his wife, who is from Argentina. (He loves to tango.)
As for more acting roles, Duvall responds to another journalist’s remark that she hoped to see him in many more films.
Duvall smiles and replies, “At least a few more.”
