“A home should be like a nest,” Robert Duvall told Architectural Digest in 2002, “functional but pretty, livable in a nice way.” The Academy Award–winning actor, who died on February 15 at 95 years old, opened the doors of his nest—a Georgian-style Virginia farmhouse—to our magazine in 2002. Known for his iconic roles in the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now (in which he utters the famous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”), and Tender Mercies, for which he won the Oscar that sat on the farmhouse’s fireplace mantel, he lived there for many years with his fourth wife, Luciana Pedraza Duvall, who designed its interiors.
“Bob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,” Luciana, who married Duvall in 2005, wrote in a statement. “To the world, he was an Academy Award–winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything. His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all.”
Robert Selden Duvall was born on January 5, 1931, in San Diego. After high school, he studied drama at Principia College in Illinois. In 1955, after two years in the Army, he embarked for New York City to pursue acting professionally. He studied at Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse and lived in an apartment with fellow budding thespian Dustin Hoffman and was close friends with Gene Hackman, another aspiring actor at the time. Duvall acted in off-Broadway productions, where he was discovered by screenwriter Horton Foote, who adapted To Kill a Mockingbird and recommended Duvall for the part of Boo Radley, his feature film debut in 1962.
Foote would later write the screenplays for Tomorrow (1972) and Tender Mercies (1983), which both starred Duvall. Another frequent professional collaborator was Francis Ford Coppola, who directed Duvall in The Rain People (1969), The Godfather (1972), and Apocalypse Now (1979). Duval earned Oscar nominations for his work in the latter two, as well as for 1998’s The Apostle, which he wrote and directed. He would receive seven Academy Award nominations throughout his career. He also acted for television; he was Emmy-nominated for his work in the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove and won the award for 2007’s Broken Trail. His final two roles were in Hustle and The Pale Blue Eye, both released in 2022.
Below, we revisit our story from the October 2002 issue of Architectural Digest about Duvall and Luciana’s Virginia farm, where the couple converted a barn into a dance hall for practicing the tango—a longtime interest of the actor, who directed the 2002 crime thriller Assassination Tango, in which he starred as a tango-dancing hitman, alongside Luciana. — Katie Schultz
Most guys don’t look at a barn and think, Let’s tango. But then most guys aren’t Robert Duvall, who can turn out Oscar-caliber performances onscreen and on the dance floor, especially when it comes to the tango—a dance the actor fell in love with about the time we fell in love with him in The Godfather. “The first night I saw Tango Argentino, Francis Ford Coppola had just asked me to play the part of the consigliere in The Godfather,” recalls Duvall, “and, ironically, there he sat in the same audience.”