Robert Duvall is Hollywood Royalty. It’s true.
Good Morning, I’m Austerity Jones, and I am back with C Thomas Printer. C Thomas, I see here that today you got no inflation talk, no Bank of Japan talk, are you feeling unwell?
C Thomas: At times, we need to learn lessons that can help us without being too deep in the weeds trying to help ourselves. Today I wanted to talk about living and conducting yourself with competence and excellence which will benefit us everyday regardless of what the market or economy is doing. We wrote about how John Wayne and Tom Cruise spanned the entire film making era from the silent movie era until present day and we argued the merits of each as history’s biggest movie star.
Today we would like to discuss Robert Duvall, one of the finest actors that has graced the big screen and whose career has spanned the decades where he managed to work with John Wayne in the Duke’s 1969 Oscar winning western True Grit where he played Lucky Ned Pepper, a gun toting bandit that met his unfortunate demise at the hands of Rooster Cogburn. He played Martin Cash, a gun shop owner, with an eye for gun hand talent in 2012’s Jack Reacher with Tom Cruise. These two roles more or less bookended his career with a few exceptions, but for almost 60 years Robert Duvall was a consummate actor’s actor.
Born in 1931, His mother’s genealogy goes back to General Robert E. Lee who we have quoted in our episode about delaying gratification while his father was a descendant of Mareen Duvall an early 17th century settler from France. Fellow descendants on his father’s side include Warren Buffett, Harry S. Truman, Barack Obama, and Dick Cheney. Perhaps it is his deep American roots that established a sense of Americana, a true believability to Duvall that shone through on the big screen. Despite his successful genealogy, Duvall had to work for everything he would get because as he put it
“I was terrible at everything but acting.” After college and a short stint in the Army, Duvall found himself in New York City, where he attended Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre learning from the great Sanford Meisner. His classmates included James Caan, perhaps best known for playing coach Sam Winters in 1994’s The Program, Dustin Hoffman, best known for starring in the cinematic masterpiece Ishtar, and the venerable Gene Hackman, whose swan song performance was in Welcome to Mooseport. Despite these excellent performance the trio managed to be nominated for 13 Academy awards winning 4 times, and this is in addition to the 7 nominations that Duvall had, winning for Tender Mercies in 1984. All of them had to work odd jobs around auditions. They hustled, they did without, and they kept trying though. What must have been in the water to have such an amazing group of talent in that class?
Duvall roomed with both Hoffman and Hackman during this time and one can only imagine them running lines back and forth as talented and hungry young thespians. He made his major film debut in the 1962 film, To Kill a Mockingbird based on the Harper Lee novel, where he met his first wife Barbara Benjamin. He was recommended by Horton Foote who would win two Academy Awards for best screenplay, one for To Kill a Mockingbird and the other for Tender Mercies. Horton called Duvall “our number one actor” which is far higher praise coming from him than from me. Duvall might be best known for playing Tom Hagen, consiglieri to the godfathers in the first two installments of that series. He played Lt. Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now uttering the famous line
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The director, Francis Ford Coppola, would call Duvall “one of the four or five best actors in the world” and Francis knew good acting when he saw it considering he was the brother of Talia Shire, the wife of Rocky Balboa, who had to act like she knew what Rocky was saying in all of those movies. Duvall played the pencil sketching sportswriter that had to brush away glass from a shattered window right before Roy Hobbs knocked the lights out.
He co-starred as a “restorer of cars” alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew Nicolas Cage in Gone in 60 seconds, a story about the Federal Reserve’s credibility
Austerity: C Thomas! No finance!
C Thomas: I’m sorry Austerity, Gone in 60 seconds was a move about car boosts and a brother’s love.
He starred in the western Open Range with Kevin Costner where his cigar smoking chocolate eating character Bluebonnet Spearman stared down evil and saved a town from treachery. He even got in on the poker boom by playing a poker champion in 2003’s Lucky You, playing an admirable role in perhaps the worst movie ever made.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about his greatest role that he got play in the epic miniseries Lonesome Dove, and his personal favorite character, Augustus “Gus” McCray. “Gus” teamed up with Captain Call, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to produce what many people consider the finest western ever made. Lonesome Dove, an adaption from the Larry McMurtry book, is the story of two old Texas Rangers, and their epic cattle drive from Texas to Montana. It explores difficult choices, friendship, and keeping your word. 8 time academy award nominee, Glenn Close describes Duvall here “I’ve always felt that great art rearranges people…And I think with great acting, it’s the same thing. It’s something that you don’t ever forget. I can still put myself back in the place of being mesmerized by Duvall and incredibly moved.” The actor Walton Goggins, of The Shield and Justified fame, named his son after the Lonesome Dove character and here he speaks about Robert Duvall.
“My son is Augustus for a reason. That’s the impact that this man has had on my life and on my psyche. When you get those heroes-and we haven’t had as many in rural America as they have in the urban areas- when you get one, you hang on to them. They become mythical.” That brings us to the word of the week:
Mythical- idealized, especially with reference to the past.
His mythical place among Hollywood royalty is secure, but he also married into royalty by marrying Argentine Luciana Pedraza, the granddaughter of the first woman in South America to get in a pilot’s license in 1937, Susana Ferrari Billinghurst, who was a descendant of the Guillermo Billinghurst, the 37th president of Peru. They are both skilled Tango dancers and own studios in America and Argentina and have been together since 1997.
Duvall has managed to accomplish all of these things despite being politically conservative or independent. He was personally invited to George W. Bush’s inauguration in 2001, and he was active in the Republican party until 2014. He has since become independent.
Perhaps Academy award winner Billy Bob Thornton describes Duvall best,
“He’d rather hang out with some old farmer he meets- you know, out in the middle of nowhere- then he would another actor, I think. Celebrity doesn’t mean a lot to him.” Robert Duvall understood that if you are incredibly competent at your craft, then you don’t need to be a celebrity. It seems that now a days society has that backward.
Robert Duvall has his own star on the prestigious St Louis Walk of Fame.
Sincerely Yours,
C Thomas Printer
This week’s financial tip
Start getting your tax paperwork put together. The best tip you can get is do your taxes. If you don’t, the IRS will find and penalize you with large amounts of interest.
On this date in history
25 years ago to be exact the Unabomber was sentenced to 4 life terms without the possibility of parole.
Also born on this date
The beautiful and talented Diane Lane who appeared in the Lonesome Dove miniseries alongside Robert Duvall.
Resources of the episode
Robert Duvall according to his peers
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