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, external. “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, external that it had “never worked out”.
