Robert Duvall was described recently by the magazine, Film Comment, as "American cinema's greatest living actor". Many believed, with good reason, that he seemed assured of his second Oscar as best actor this year for The Apostle, a labour of love which he also wrote, produced, directed and financed with his own money. The film features Duvall in a moving and mesmerising portrayal of a Texas-born, Pentacostal preacher with an all-consuming zeal that is sorely undermined by human frailty. For reasons best known to the electorate, the Oscar went to Jack Nicholson for his all-too-familiar routine in As Good As It Gets, passing over Duvall's quite astonishing performance which arguably marks the apex in his brilliant career.
That career began auspiciously in 1962 when Duvall was cast as the mysterious Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. "My parents pushed me into acting, you know," he recalled in London earlier this month, en route to the European premiere of The Apostle in Cannes. At 67, Duvall looks fit and smartly dressed in a cream suit, pale blue shirt and light brown tie, and comes across as direct, unassuming and utterly unpretentious.
He was born in San Diego and his family moved east when he was 10, to Annapolis in Maryland. His father, who was a rear-admiral in the Navy, encouraged his son's pursuit of drama studies. "I didn't know what to do," Robert Duvall says. "It was the end of the Korean war, so acting seemed a pretty expedient measure, I guess, but I really began to like it. My mother was a wonderful mimic, there was music on my father's side of the family, and my brothers are both professional singers. So you could say there were some ingredients in the pot."
Moving to New York in 1955, he sustained himself with odd jobs and shared an apartment with fellow unknowns, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. In 1965 he won an Obie award for his performance off-Broadway in A View From the Bridge, and he made his Broadway debut in Wait Until Dark, earning excellent reviews as the villain, a role recently played to derisive notices by Quentin Tarantino. He was back on Broadway 12 years later, in a reputedly legendary performance as Teach in Ulu Grosbard's production of David Mamet's American Buffalo.
His sporadic television work, which began early on in episodes of Naked City, which were filmed live, included the roles of Dwight D Eisenhower, Josef Stalin and Adolph Eichmann and his Emmy-nominated performance as Gus, the veteran Texas ranger in the mini-series, Lonesome Dove.
His most prodigious and prolific output has been for the cinema. He earned three Oscar nominations - as the self-effacing Tom Hagen in The Godfather, a role he reprised in the sequel; as the colonel who loved the smell of napalm in the morning in Apocalypse Now; and as the bullying Navy pilot in The Great Santini - before his overdue 1983 victory as best actor for his unsentimental portrayal of a country singer rebuilding his life in Tender Mercies, for which he wrote and sang his own songs.
Marked by an unfussy realism and an apparently effortless versatility, his many memorable movies also included The Chase, The Rain People, M*A*S*H, THX 1138, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, The Conversation, Network, True Confessions, Colors, Rambling Rose, Falling Down and Sling Blade.
"In an ideal world I would do the projects I prefer to do, but I work as a hired hand, too," he says, dismissing the effects-driven Deep Impact, now on release here, in which he plays a former astronaut brought out of retirement when a comet is discovered on a collision course with our planet. He hasn't seen it, and you get the impression that he has no intention of bothering to see it. "It's a typical Hollywood film," he says. "Not one I hold fondly in my memory."
He directed two small films before embarking on the adventure that has been The Apostle. In 1977 he made We're Not the Jet Set, a documentary about a Nebraska rodeo family he met while filming Francis Ford Coppola's The Rain People, and in 1983 Angelo, My Love, an engaging picture of New York gypsies featuring a non-professional cast - and a cameo by Duvall's two singing brothers - which was selected for an out-of-competition screening at Cannes.
His ideas for the movie which became The Apostle began to germinate when he was touring with a play destined for an off-Broadway run. "I found myself in this small delta town in Arkansas where there was nothing to do," he says, "and I wandered into one of these little churches, which was quite a revelation to me, and I thought I'd like to play one of those preachers some day. It took me quite a few years to get it off the ground."
No Hollywood studio would touch the project, but he persisted. At a time when so many lesser actors will not touch anything but the safest-looking, cynically packaged product - and when so many multi-millionaire actors will not risk a cent of their own money on less obviously commercial pictures without the security of someone else's backing - Duvall went all the way.
"It was all my movie," he says proudly. He put up the budget, saved from his earnings as "a hired hand", which added up to "just a little short of $5 million". His faith in The Apostle was rewarded when a bidding battle broke out after the movie's world premiere at the Toronto festival last autumn and October Films, the specialist division of Universal Pictures, bought it for $6 million. "So I got back what I put in, plus change," he smiles. "I feel good about that. I feel righteous."
That deal involved a delicate compromise: October Films wanted the movie cut down from its original 151-minute length to secure an extra screening a day in cinemas, and Duvall's response was surprisingly sanguine. "We got this brilliant editor in, but at first it became a gutting rather than a trimming process," he says. "We finally took out 17 minutes by snipping here and there and without hurting the substance or the integrity of a scene. I insisted that certain things be put back in."
It was in the end, he says, preferable to doing a deal that would leave his film at the mercy of a Hollywood studio. "Some of the most interesting music, literature and culture comes from the South, and that's a given, even in Hollywood, but when they cross below the Mason-Dixie line in a film, they tend to patronise that whole part of the country. I wanted to make sure I didn't do that." He expresses particular dissatisfaction with Hollywood's treatment of evangelists on screen. "I know Elmer Gantry won lots of awards, but I never saw it," he says. "I saw a clip from it, but it just didn't interest me." He says that he himself has always been "kind of religious" in his own way. "I come from a Protestant background and I believe in Jesus Christ and his works. And I believe you've got to practice what you preach."
He seems surprised that the primary image non-Americans have of US evengelists is of those grotesque television hams whose main intent appears to be bleeding their congregation for money. "Sure, you get the obvious TV shenanigans which can really turn people off," he says, "but there are some wonderful people in the rank and file, whether you believe in them or not."
Researching the film, he spent time in Texas every month for 10 months: "I would inundate myself with church services and preachers, and drive for miles. I remember one Sunday morning I went church-hopping, so to speak, taking in six different churches. It was all foreign to my girlfriend, who's from Argentina, a Catholic country. She said, `Bob, are we ever going to go to white churches?'.
"The black Baptist minister has been a pillar of these communities since the days of slavery. They're like communal mentors. The best preacher I ever saw was a 96-year-old black in Virginia. To me he seemed much more spiritual than Mahatma Gandhi.
"It's a part of my country's history and they say it's one of the true American art forms, that of the preacher."
The Apostle goes on release on June 12th