Robert Duvall puts today’s celeb poseurs to shame

On hearing of the death of the actor Robert Duvall at the age of 95, I realised that although I had always thought him very good at what he did, I knew absolutely nothing about his private life or political beliefs, even though his career lasted a whopping seven decades. Happy days!

It turns out that, according to Wikipedia, ‘his political views were variously described as libertarian or conservative’. Or ‘extreme right-wing’ as someone holding similar views would be described if they were still alive. He supported George W Bush, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Sarah Palin, but two years after endorsing Mitt Romney in 2012, he declared the Republican Party ‘a mess’.

It takes character to renounce something you’ve spent a great deal of your life advocating. I find it very hard to imagine modern actors behaving in such an open-minded manner, no matter how foolish their views are proved to be. They’ll keep believing that women can have penises until they’re taking that final curtain call – or, in the case of The Crown star Olivia Colman, that she is in fact nonbinary and her own straight husband’s gay boyfriend.

The son of an admiral in the US Navy, Duvall was expected to follow his father into a fancy naval academy. But, as he later explained: ‘I was terrible at everything but acting… I could barely get through school.’ He nevertheless served as a soldier in the Korean War, but played down his alleged bravery. Referring to ‘some confusion in the press’ involving stories of him ‘shooting it out with the Commies from a foxhole – Pork Chop Hill stuff’, he admitted: ‘I barely qualified… in basic training.’ This modesty was typical of the man – of being married four times and remaining childless, he said: ‘I’m shooting blanks… I’ve tried with a lot of different women.’

After de-mobilisation, he worked at everything from sorting mail to driving trucks – this was no Apple Martin, to put it mildly. It’s creepy now how when someone in public life mentions that they did menial jobs at the start of their working lives, such as Kemi Badenoch at McDonald’s, the nepo-heavy elite feels the need to mock them for ‘pretending’ to be working class. Saying that one knows what it’s like to do an ordinary job in order to earn a living is portrayed as being pretentious, a pose, and somehow deceitful by people – especially in the media – who practically inherited their jobs.

I can count on one hand the number of people in showbusiness who don’t scold and slither with the herd, parroting the accepted line on everything from immigration to hydration. There’s Helen Mirren, who was unusual from the get-go. Despite her cut-glass accent she was never a cookie-cutter posh girl of the kind who came to prominence in 1960s showbiz. She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff to an Englishwoman from the East End – the 13th of 14 children born to a butcher – and an exiled Russian, a grandson of a countess, who worked as a taxi driver. Is it being such a rare bird that has made her utterly impervious in her support for Israel? From working on a Kibbutz in the Golan Heights just after the Six-Day War in 1967 (‘The extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground – it was an amazing time to be there’) to appearing at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2023, Dame Helen has chosen her own political path. Recent events have not caused her to falter, and her support for Israel since the Islamist pogroms and the resulting war in Gaza has been constant. Like JK Rowling, she has reached those sunlit heights where she can speak against her tribe without any fear of being ruined.

What has happened in showbiz is a microcosm of what has happened to society as a whole, albeit a well-lit and painstakingly enunciated brand. It’s fascinating to remember that the majority of actors, say, weren’t always attitude-striking snobs and scolds; I remember as a youngster reading about the Communist witch-hunts in Hollywood and thinking that these people who risked their livelihoods doing the thing they loved were the most daring and glamorous people who had ever lived. As a teenager, I idolised ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda for going to Vietnam and posing on Communist tanks. What was I thinking? American atrocities against unarmed civilians probably had something to do with it. As such, the fact that Fonda was an expensively educated old-school nepo-baby seemed irrelevant. But her recent jumping on the anti-ICE bandwagon has laid bare the sense of superiority that drives the showbiz socialists above all else, and makes them sound not just wrong, but utterly deranged: ‘We pay their salaries. We should be in charge. We’re seeing things happen that have never happened before. This isn’t like it was in the Forties and Fifties’, she said last month.

That’s how you’ll recognise the bad actors, even when they’re accomplished ones like Jane Fonda. Everything has to be the worst it’s ever been. Like when David Lammy said that comparing the European Research Group of pro-Brexit Tory MPs to Nazis and proponents of South African Apartheid was ‘not strong enough’. As Jacob Rees-Mogg put it, ‘I feel sorry for Mr Lammy, comparing a parliamentary ginger group with an organisation and creed that killed six million Jewish people makes him look foolish and his comments unbalanced. It damages his reputation.’ When people insist on this kind of political catastrophising – seen in so many areas now – you know that they are, in some part, doing it because it excites them.

Some of Fonda’s grandstanding sounds like she has watched one of her dad Henry’s classic little-man-against-the-system films and paraphrased it badly. ‘We’ve had enough, right? We are the land of the brave’, she recently said. ‘So let’s show that we are the land of the free.’ Not so much 12 Angry Men as one hangry gran.

When back in the 20th century I heard that a celebrity was left-wing, I presumed they were intelligent. Now I presume the opposite. I think of what Gore Vidal said: ‘The Puritans left England for America not because they couldn’t be Puritans in their mother country, but because they were not allowed to force others to become Puritans. In the New World, of course, they could and did.’ Trump Derangement Syndrome is the new Puritanism, and its pop-eyed proponents see no punishment as too extreme for the object of their objections, from Madonna in 2017 saying that she ‘thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House’ (she hilariously later defended it as a metaphor for love, not literal violence) to Kathy Griffin getting the boot from CNN for posting herself on Instagram holding a model of a severed head of Trump, covered in blood. We only have to think of the ghastly example of Ellen DeGeneres to reflect that the meaner a person is in their private life, the more blather they will talk about universal love for the brotherhood of man in public.

Robert Duvall was free of such modish malarkey. He was a churchgoer but was not keen on talking about his faith, saying only that he had ‘always been a believer’. He was, finally, by all accounts, a joy to work with. His death is another nail in the coffin of a time when performers kept their histrionics for their day-job.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.