HOWZAT

His brother Jack, a lawyer, who died in 2000, thought of some good reasons. “But he was paranoid about anybody I was with. I could have been with a saint and it would still be the same thing. Of course, you wonder what it’s about. If I wasn’t successful I wouldn’t be with anybody, but hopefully there’s another side to me that’s OK other than my success.” On his return to America after falling for Luciana he called his friend Wilford Brimley (“old cowboy actor, used to be a bodyguard for Howard Hughes, interesting guy”) and said he knew everyone was worried. “Wilford said: ‘Let me tell you something, friend. Worst thing in the world for an old man is an old woman.’ I still laugh over that one.”

He first married in 1964. Barbara Benjamin was a former dancer from The Jackie Gleason Show, divorced with three daughters. After leaving her in 1975 he dated the actress Lindsay Cruise and in 1982 married another film actress, Gail Youngs. Their relationship failed after four years. In an interview she called him a “tormented soul” driven by the need for perfection, to which he responds: “She was tortured. Nice lady. She adopted three crack babies recently.” His final marriage, in 1991, was to a tango instructor, Sharon Brophy.

After five years he gave her 30 minutes to pack her bags after he discovered her affair with the pool cleaner. “She was the most illogical of them all. I haven’t seen her since. Had a great dog, though, a Jack Russell. Best I ever saw. I always said I wanted canine visitation rights. But I never saw the dog after that.” In the past he has talked of his failed marriages in terms of betrayal: his of his first wife, and his second and third’s betrayal of him. Now he admits it takes two to mess up. He confesses, too, to having a temper.

Dustin Hoffman has recalled how Duvall on stage would spot someone in the audience he imagined did not like him and train his anger on him. As he walked off after taking his bow he would lean over and yell, “F*** you!” Michael Caine, who worked with him on Secondhand Lions, says he had a “quite violent” temper that would erupt for a few seconds and then subside. “Maybe that’s true.” Has he got better at controlling it? “Yes, but, I mean, when it happens it happens. No mystery. They say, ‘Oh, he’s difficult to work with.’ Well maybe the director’s someone that’s difficult to work with, you know. Maybe it’s the director as much as the actor.”

He cites Henry Hathaway, with whom he worked on True Grit in 1969: “He’d say, ‘When I say, “Action!” tense up, Goddam you.’ It’s hard to work under that as a young actor.” He fell out with Bruce Beresford, the Australian director of Tender Mercies in 1983, the movie for which he won his only Oscar, but he had all along wanted the film to be directed by Ken Loach who, despite his leftist politics, he reveres. He is loyal about Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, in which he played Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore, the helicopter cavalryman who loved the smell of napalm in the morning.

“But I was really ticked off that they cut out the scene that they put in the Redux, of me saving a baby’s life, because it showed another side to the guy. Just because you are a warrior and a soldier doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart.” He thinks Costner did a good job directing Open Range, although he recognises it is an imitative rather than strictly authentic portrayal of the West.

To me, it is an allegory about the creation of America, the dispute between freedom and the rule of law, and emphasises America as a nation of immigrants: Costner and Duvall ride with a Mexican (Diego Luna) and feud with a small town sheriff played by Michael Gambon at his most Irish. Duvall knows something about this. His ancestry includes a family of Englishmen who went west to Montana to run 90,000 head of sheep back to Dakota.

“I was doing my research — you read a little of this and that — and of course the horse was the means of transportation back then. They had a big horse competition in Texas. Of course, the Comanche could ride bareback, do anything. But third place went to a Mexican, second to a Comanche and first place went to a white guy from Florida, probably an Irish-Scottish immigrant who had great intuition with horses.”

It is strange, I say, that America has lately become paranoid about immigration. “That’s not the same. That’s Mexicans, illegals and so on. We would be inundated. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.” Pedraza joins in: “A lot of people talk about the immigrants who come into this country being exploited. Nobody makes a documentary about why they came here.

” “Loach,” he says, thinking disappointedly of Bread and Roses, Loach’s recent film about striking immigrant workers in Los Angeles, “should have made a film in Mexico about why they were forced to come.”

The conversation descends into a dialogue of mutual agreement between Duvall and Pedraza on the merits of America. If people round the world choose to eat McDonald’s, let them eat McDonald’s, she says. Tony Benn, he says, displaying an unlikely interest in British politics, is “conveniently left wing” but he “came from the aristocracy”. Pedraza knows a Ukrainian nurse who says the Russians loved everything American. “Even under Communism,” says Duvall.

Perhaps politics is the cement for this odd relationship. Duvall seems very much at home.

Open Range opens in cinemas next week

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