What was Robert Duvall’s first role in a movie?
Robert Duvall is a titan of film acting to whom few can hold a candle. His CV reads like a greatest movies list in itself, from Bullitt to True Grit, The Godfather Parts I and II to The Conversation, Network to Apocalypse Now. For more than 60 years, he’s commanded the big screen across an enormous breadth of characterisations marked by a profound depth of performance.
But back in 1961, he was an off-Broadway stage actor with a few bit-part TV credits to his name and no experience of the big time. Meanwhile, a playwright who’d worked with Duvall briefly while he was studying acting at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse was applying the finishing touches to his first major film script. Horton Foote was adapting a best-selling novel for first-time producer Alan J Pakula and young director Robert Mulligan.
Later, Mulligan and Pakula were looking for an actor willing to play a minor but pivotal character in the film, with its climax resting on a meeting between this character and the child protagonist. Foote came to them with a suggestion. “I knew Horton for years,” Duvall recalled to Sojourners in 2012. “I met him at the Neighborhood Playhouse. We did a play of his and he liked what he saw.” The play was The Midnight Caller, in which Duvall had played an aloof drunkard.
“Remember that boy you saw play the drunk?” someone had asked Foote. “He could be very good for this part.” In no position to argue without a viable alternative within the movie’s slight $2 million budget, Mulligan and Pakula listened to Foote and went ahead with casting Duvall.
So, what was the part?
The film was 1962 Academy Award-winner To Kill a Mockingbird, which the American Film Institute has since ranked among the most inspirational pictures of all time. And Duvall would be playing Boo Radley, the mysterious recluse universally feared among the children of Maycomb, Alabama, who becomes the town’s unlikely hero when he rescues Scout Finch in the movie’s closing moments.
It’s only in the final scene that we get to meet him properly. Radley shuffles back in fear when the shadow of an open door is removed from his face. Scout examines him curiously before realising who he is. He blinks shyly, and the fear in his eyes evaporates as the slightest smile emerges from the corner of his mouth. “Hey Boo,” Scout says gently. His smile broadens. Although he doesn’t say a word, his face says everything the scene needs, moving us more than any utterance could. It’s a mesmerising performance, that moves us in part because of its brevity and absence of dialogue, not in spite of these things.
In less than two minutes, the world had been introduced to Robert Duvall on the big screen. He did more in that small role than most actors manage over the course of several films. One of his most memorable movie moments was his very first, filmed at the age of 31 and a decade away from genuine stardom. But already building the legacy of an all-time great.
