A Different Kind of Leading Man

Robert Duvall didn’t speak a word in his first film performance. When he was cast as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was but an up-and-coming theater actor, and his role as the silent, mysterious neighbor to the heroine Scout Finch was small but pivotal. With his shock of blond hair and his haunted, sunken eyes, he somehow looked both childlike and ancient, and although Duvall wouldn’t rise to proper fame for another 10 years, Mockingbird was, for most of the world, an introduction to...