How Robert Duvall became a Hollywood great

Robert Duvall was a distinguished and prolific screen actor who lent a brooding intensity and grizzled authority to seven decades of American film-making.

Nominated for Academy Awards on seven occasions, he won best actor for his role as a troubled country singer in 1983's Tender Mercies.

His many other roles included a mafia consigliere in The Godfather, a bombastic army officer in Apocalypse Now, and a Texas Ranger-turned-cattle driver in Lonesome Dove.

More character actor than leading man, he could be relied upon to inject a feisty, fiery machismo and a cantankerous contrariness into the most mainstream Hollywood offering.

Born Robert Selden Duvall in January 1931 in San Diego, California, Duvall was a self-proclaimed "navy brat" due to his father's life-long career in the United States Navy.

His father expected him to follow him into the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Yet his son instead served two years in the army following his 1953 college graduation.

Duvall subsequently moved to New York to study acting, working as a postal clerk to make ends meet. His classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman, who both became lifelong friends.

"A friend is someone who many years ago offered you his last $300 when you broke your pelvis," he would later recall. "A friend is Gene Hackman."

Duvall began acting professionally at the Gateway Playhouse, a summer theatre in Long Island, where he starred in plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and others.

His performance in Horton Foote's one-act play The Midnight Caller led the playwright to recommend him for the role of Boo Radley in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.

By that time, Duvall had already appeared on television in such shows as Naked City, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Armstrong Circle Theatre.

To Kill a Mockingbird, which Foote adapted from Harper Lee's novel, was the actor's first film role and led to appearances in such films as The Chase, Bullitt and True Grit.

The Rain People, released in 1969, marked his first collaboration with director Francis Ford Coppola, with whom he would go on to work in the first two Godfather films.

Other significant roles around this time included the highly strung Major Burns in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H and THX 1138, the eponymous protagonist of George Lucas's dystopian 1971 sci-fi debut.

Duvall's performance as The Godfather's Tom Hagen, the shrewd chief advisor to Marlon Brando's ageing Don Vito Corleone, earned him his first Academy Award nomination in 1973.

He reprised the role in 1974's The Godfather Part II, by which time he had collaborated with Foote again in the 1972 film of his play Tomorrow. Network, from 1976, cast him as a venal television producer.

Meanwhile, there were appearances with Michael Caine in The Eagle Has Landed, Laurence Olivier in The Betsy, and Muhammad Ali in the boxer's biopic The Greatest.

In 1979, Duvall gave perhaps his most memorable performance as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Coppola's Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now.

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning," his character famously declared after leading a deadly helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village.

The actor was shown to no less domineering effect in The Great Santini, playing a frustrated Marine pilot who hectors and browbeats his teenage children.

The scene in which he torments his son by bouncing a basketball against his head was spoofed by Mike Myers' Dr Evil in the second Austin Powers film.

Duvall's work in Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini saw him nominated for Oscars in consecutive years. The former also earned him a Bafta and the first of four Golden Globe awards.

Yet it was his role as alcoholic singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies that finally saw him land an Oscar, beating an all-British line-up of fellow nominees that included Caine and Albert Finney.

Duvall's other Oscar nominations came for his performances in 1997's The Apostle, 1998 legal drama A Civil Action and 2014's The Judge.

In The Apostle, which he also wrote and directed, the actor played an evangelical preacher who begins a new life in Louisiana after committing a crime.

In real life, Duvall attended church regularly during his childhood but was reluctant to discuss his faith, merely disclosing he had "always been a believer".

The staunch Republican was less reticent about his political persuasions and was a guest at President George W Bush's inauguration in 2001.

Duvall's other many screen roles included an LA police office in Colors, an astronaut in Deep Impact, and a Nascar crew chief in Days of Thunder alongside Tom Cruise.

He was reunited with Cruise in 2012's Jack Reacher, in which Duvall played a former soldier turned gun shop owner.

Yet Duvall often looked happiest when riding a horse, be it in the acclaimed TV mini-series Lonesome Dove or in the Kevin Costner Western Open Range.

"I think the Western kind of defines us," the actor said in 2016. "The English have Shakespeare; the French, Moliere; the Russians have Chekhov. But the Western is ours."

His other passions included football, the tango and the Argentine capital Buenos Aires, a city he professed to love "more than any place else".

"A young actor once asked me 'What do you do between jobs?'" he once recalled. "I said, 'Hobbies, hobbies and more hobbies'. It keeps you off dope."

Duvall was married and divorced three times and is survived by his fourth wife, the Argentine actress Luciana Pedraza. He did not father any children, commenting in 2003 that it had "never worked out".