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"FacebookPinterest\n\nRobert Duvall&amp;#39;s Georgian farmhouse sits on 360 rolling acres dotted with deer and Texas cattle. He&amp;#39;s got three small dogs that make much of his comings and goings\u2014a blond Scottie named for the recently departed Scottish footballer Jinky Johnstone; Paco, who&amp;#39;s half dingo; and Pancho, a Jack Russell terrier. &amp;quot;I had a great Jack Russell\u2014the greatest,&amp;quot; Duvall says with a twang. &amp;quot;He&amp;#39;d eat the balloons on New Year&amp;#39;s Eve and shit &amp;#39;em out for three days. But I didn&amp;#39;t get caninevisitation rights when I divorced so I never saw him again. It got a little too much, their closeness\u2014my wife would squeeze him and his dick would come out. But what a dog he was, my God.&amp;quot; Gus, he was called, so named for Gus McCrae, Duvall&amp;#39;s character in Lonesome Dove.\n\nI don&amp;#39;t know what I&amp;#39;d expected; with someone so capable of intimidation onscreen, I guess I thought he&amp;#39;d be more\u2026intimidating. Duvall in person is chatty and solicitous, guiding you across the street by the elbow, offering a cup of tea. He&amp;#39;s respectful of the smallest moments, ecuting them with easy grace.\n\nHe plays his characters the same way, honoring the details that, in the aggregate, constitute an authentic human life. &amp;quot;When I was doing Lonesome Dove, something took me out to West Texas, and I looked up Sammy Baugh, the old quarterback for the Washington Redskins, and that&amp;#39;s where I got my gesture for the whole part,&amp;quot; Duvall says. &amp;quot;He would talk about throwing a pass&amp;quot;\u2014and here he illustrates with a fluid, majestic bend of the arm. &amp;quot;And my mouth&amp;#39;s open watching this guy. I said, &amp;#39;Wow, this is what I&amp;#39;ve been looking for&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\u2014the distinctly western physicality of an exjock horseman.\n\nWe&amp;#39;re sitting by the fire, which was crackling away by the time I arrived. There is a pelt draped over the couch and antlers on plaques throughout the house. In the dining room is a butcher&amp;#39;s table dense enough to take apart a cow on, with as resting in a slot in the block itself.\n\nDuvall is now 75 years old, a milestone to be reckoned with for one of the sturdiest fixtures of American cinema. His face looks like it might have been whittled with a buck knife. The smallish watery blue eyes are hooded as ever, the loose skin beneath them swagged like bordello drapes. Despite the imposing screen presence, he&amp;#39;s not big up close\u2014more of a barrelchested welterweight, with crooked arms and slim, slightly bowed legs. His scalp is freckled\u2014what hair he has hangs in a greased wedge at the back of his neck.\n\nOn this chilly day at his ranch in northern Virginia, he wears a dark sweater, dark slacks, and brown suede cowboy boots. The smile comes easily, but when it does, it&amp;#39;s a lipless slash.\n\nThe characters are all right there, especially McCrae, the former Texas Ranger\u2014protector of whores, leader of men. Duvall is the master of the rural American idiom, with its deceptive simplicity, its windinthewheat rhythms. No one could bring more to a role like that; he calls it &amp;quot;my favorite. Let the English play Hamlet and King Lear\u2014I&amp;#39;ll play Augustus McCrae.&amp;quot; This month he&amp;#39;ll appear in Broken Trail, a twopart miniseries on AMC, as Print Ritter, a rancher from the 1890s who enlists his estranged nephew Thomas Haden Church) for one long last horse drive. The folkheroic Ritter, who has an elegiac kinship with the dwindling frontier, is in the spirit of McCrae.\n\nBut there are a lot of favorites when it comes to Duvall; his work over the course of more than eighty films and four and a half decades has yielded a string of iconic performances. That overused word iconic\u2014and yet with Duvall it patently applies. His broadstrokes blowhard in The Great Santini is the enduring face of the hardtoplease dad, while Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now, stalking a ravaged beach in Vietnam bare chested, is the last word in hawkish zeal. Nearly thirty years later, young guys still extol napalm&amp;#39;s bouquet as some sort of drunken rite\u2014channeling as fierce an image of maleness as they have ever seen onscreen.\n\nBut for all the impact he&amp;#39;s made, Duvall isn&amp;#39;t a personality, a showboating breastbeater, like so many of the guys he came up with in Hollywood during its cockiest, most dissolute era. A rightleaning teetotaler and appreciator of quiet, characterdefining truths, he has never been what you&amp;#39;d call fashionable, which makes his contribution all the more astonishing.\n\nIn a fundamental way, Duvall resembles his strongest characters men of honor and faith\u2014untainted, unmediated by modernity and glitz\u2014and getting them right is the great privilege of this job. In the early &amp;#39;80s, while preparing for Tender Mercies, Duvall was on a factfinding road trip in East Texas with a friend who had to ask at one point, &amp;quot;Hey, Duvall, what are we looking for&amp;quot; To which Duvall replied, &amp;quot;We&amp;#39;re looking for accents!&amp;quot;\n\nAnd yes, it was nice to win an Oscar for that one, an impeccably minimalist meditation on redemption for which he also sang, in a gentle countrycured tenor; the gold statue peers down from the mantel right above us. Yet real validation came not from Club Hollywood but from Nashville\u2014from Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and also from Johnny Cash, who was sitting with him on Oscar night. As Duvall tells me proudly, &amp;quot;They bought what I did.&amp;quot;\n\nFor the full article, pick up the June 2006 issue of GQ.\n\nLUCY KAYLIN is a GQ features editor."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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