Robert Duvall was a vigorous and subtle actor who always performed with passion and conviction

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From his steely self-effacing consigliere in The Godfather to his surf-crazed Wagner enthusiast in Apocalypse Now, just to see him on screen made me smile Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now and Godfather star, dies aged 95 Robert Duvall was a foghorn-voiced bull of pure American virility, and he put energy and heart into the movies for more than 60 years. Just to see him on screen was enough to make me smile. That handsome face and head gave him the look of a Roman emperor from Waxahachie, Texas or a three-star general playing the country music circuit. Duvall was famously bald (the rare roles needing hairpieces always looked artificial on him) and so he looked the same age almost all his acting life: forever in his vigorous fortysomething prime – though often playing figures complicated with tenderness and woundedness. Duvall had a long, rich career, starting out with notable roles in To Kill a Mockingbird, M*A*S*H, The Conversation and Network, but it was destiny to be chiefly kno...
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Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

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Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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