Robert Duvall: 'I'm a late bloomer'

Like any actor, Robert Duvall is thinking ahead to the next gig. "I think Tom Cruise is doing a film on the attempted assassination of Hitler," he tells me, referring to Bryan Singer's Valkyrie. "I'd love to be in that. I'd love to play one of those German guys. I know I could do that. But evidently there's no room for me."

He's certainly qualified. The man The New York Times once called "the American Olivier" has played his fair share of historical figures, Joseph Stalin, General Eisenhower and Adolf Eichmann among them. And remarkably, the 76-year-old Duvall still has the desire to hustle for work he's in next month's thriller We Own the Night.

Duvall is certainly fighting fit. "My wife has got me doing yoga," he says, patting what looks like a firm stomach. "But if you marry a younger woman, it helps." His fourth wife, Luciana Pedraza, whom he met in a bakery in Buenos Aires, is 41 years younger than he is.

Kim Stanley, who narrated the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Duvall made his film debut as the mute "Boo" Radley, once told him that after the age of 40, "something happens [to American male actors] and they go down." He was exactly this age when he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather as the Corleone family consiglieri Tom Hagen. In many ways, this marked the start of the second, most fruitful, phase of his career. "I've always been a late bloomer," he says. "Some of my better work has come later, I think."

Yet Duvall's more recent studio films have been forgettable: he's played a car thief in Gone In 60 Seconds, a retired astronaut in Deep Impact, a competitive dad in the Will Ferrell comedy Kicking & Screaming and a poker specialist in Lucky You. "I like to do a Hollywood movie now and then," he says. "Not too many of the big films any more, because the big films are all these action films."

As we talk, Duvall admits he's been mulling over his legacy. "I was fortunate enough to be in two of the biggest film experiences in the last part of the 20th century; The Godfather, and then the television mini-series Lonesome Dove," he says. "Those were my two biggest things."

The latter choice is surprising, although the 1989 series did win Duvall a Golden Globe. He holds the show, in which he played Texas cowpoke Gus McCrae, in high regard. "Lonesome Dove was my favourite character of my whole career," he says. The Godfather "was a catalyst that helped us all," he says, but playing Hagen never quite gave Duvall the career that his co-stars Al Pacino and James Caan went on to enjoy.

Duvall, it seems, was doomed to be the character actor; like his Godfather role, the man behind the man. David Thomson wrote in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that Duvall was "neither beautiful nor forceful enough to carry a big film".

If this is not entirely true look at his Oscar-nominated turn in his 1997 directorial effort The Apostle you could argue that Duvall is at his most memorable in short bursts. Think of Kilgore, the surfing-obsessed officer he played in Apocalypse Now. Aided by one of the most famous lines in film history ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning"), Duvall has 15 minutes of screen time but leaves an indelible mark.

Duvall once said: "Being a leading man is an agent's dream, not an actor's." But he evidently dreamed of flexing his star muscle. The year after Lonesome Dove, he had the chance to reprise his Godfather role in Part III, but wanted $5m. The producers refused, and George Hamilton was drafted in as the family's new lawyer.

Duvall compares James Gray, the director of We Own the Night, to Coppola and his peers. "He's very talented. He could be right up there with those guys." The story of two brothers on different sides of the law reunites Gray's young leading men from his 2000 underworld story The Yards. Joaquin Phoenix plays Bobby, a club owner involved with the Russian mafia in New York in the 1980s, and Mark Wahlberg is Joseph, the cop, with Duvall cast as their father Bert, also a veteran of the force.

Bobby is recruited to go undercover to redeem himself in the eyes of his law-abiding relatives. "I felt this was like the reverse of The Godfather," says Duvall, "where Pacino is going straight at university, and when they need him, he comes back."

Duvall left Phoenix suitably impressed. "He has a complete solidity with the character. He cannot be swayed. You cannot get him out of character. I've never seen anything like it. It's amazing," the young actor said.

Duvall himself is not one to analyse his work. Asked if he thinks the film has Shakespearean overtones Gray has said he was thinking of Henry IV when writing he seems unsure. "Maybe, yeah. Relationships, fathers, sons... could be. That's James's vision more. We just follow as the characters. The speech is obviously less classical and traditional, but some of the concepts could be the same. Absolutely."

Duvall has never followed the Hollywood blueprint. Take The Apostle, which took him 15 years to get off the ground. "A guy in Hollywood said, 'There's too much talk.' All preachers do is talk, so they missed the point. I didn't expect much from Hollywood."

Rather than water down the script, he put his own money into the film. Duvall won his sixth Oscar nod for his role, and the film made more than $20m worldwide. Not that it proved a big payday for Duvall: "I got my money back plus change, but I hardly made a dime."

It hasn't put him off. Dividing his time between Argentina and a farm in Virginia, where he has edited his last two films and two documentaries made by his wife, he's trying to get off the ground a script written by a friend about the "border problem" between Texas and Mexico. "It's a prevalent topic, very complex and nobody is doing anything to solve it," he says, knocking on the table superstitiously, worried that he may jinx the project. But Duvall, like Kilgore, seems to be the sort to make it through life "without a scratch". The late bloomer is still very much in flower.

'We Own the Night' opens on 14 December