Robert Duvall: The shape-shifter who could be savage or sweet

Robert Duvall disappeared into his characters. Over a six-decade career he approached highly diverse roles like “an ethnologist on a field trip into the soul,” as one critic put it. Among his memorable leading performances were roles as an explosive Marine pilot who tyrannizes his family in The Great Santini (1979) and as a fading, alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), which won him a Best Actor Oscar. He also starred as an illiterate, deeply kind farmer in the Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (1972)...