Robert Duvall Didn’t Steal Scenes. He Grounded Them.

It’s common to praise an actor by calling him a real scene-stealer, and you could say that about Robert Duvall, who died on Sunday at the age of 95.

Duvall, after all, was a commanding presence in films from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to “The Pale Blue Eye,” picking up seven Oscar nominations and one win along the way. He also delivered one of the formidably and endlessly quotable lines in cinema history in “Apocalypse Now” when his character, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, squats shirtless on the beach and says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

But really, to call him a scene-stealer misses the point. Robert…