When people talk about an actor with range, they usually mean the wide variety of roles they can play. De Niro going from Travis Bickle to Jake LaMotta. Brando going from On the Waterfront to Guys and Dolls. Pacino playing both Michael Corleone and Tony Montana, two gangsters with diametrically opposed approaches to criminality.

The same holds true for Robert Duvall, a tremendous screen actor who died on Monday at the age of 95, and whose credits — over 150 in a career spanning six decades — include everything from a Texas Ranger (Lonesome Dove) to a Texas outlaw (True Grit); a sinister TV boss (Network) to an enlightened L.A. cop (Colors); an ex-con pulling off one last job (The Outfit) to an aging rancher protecting his land (Open Range); a conniving sports journalist (The Natural) to an editor-in-chief seeking redemption (The Paper) to a Soviet dictator (Stalin).

There are a hundred other examples in Duvall’s vast filmography, which lasted all the way till he was over 90, when he held his final roles as a seasoned practitioner of black magic (The Pale Blue Eye) and the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers (Hustle). Like many actors who hailed from a generation trained under the Method — in Duvall’s case, with the legendary Sanford Meisner — and who cut their chops in the burgeoning years of television, Duvall was extremely prolific and willing to try out any part at least once.

But he had a gift few performers have ever showcased to such an extent: a range that not only spread horizontally, shifting through characters across the board, but vertically, allowing him to be a big, bellowing, destructive man in one movie, and then a small, discreet, vulnerable one in the next. This extreme pendulum of human temperament meant Duvall could go from boiling hot to ice cold within a single film or even a single scene. It helped him to fully embody people at either end of the spectrum, in a series of iconic roles that made him one of the greatest.

Let’s start with the famous ones: For The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola always wanted Duvall to play the soft-spoken Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen. In the director’s previous feature, The Rain People, the actor was terrifying as a nutso highway patrolman who tries to rape the film’s heroine. It was the polar opposite of Hagen, but Coppola knew Duvall had the range for both parts.

What makes the actor so formidable in The Godfather is how Hagen always sits in the shadows, serving as both strategic advisor and silent moral compass to a corrupt family. An adopted son to Don Corleone, and therefore not a blood brother, Tom Hagen is a perpetual outsider who at one point becomes the Don himself. This happens during a memorable scene between Duvall and Pacino in The Godfather: Part II, after the Corleone’s Lake Tahoe compound gets ambushed. Duvall plays a man of few words, so when he looks at Pacino and says, “I always wanted to be thought of as a brother by you, Mike. A real brother,” it carries the weight of the world, and tons of contained emotion.

In another Coppola classic, Apocalypse Now, Duvall portrayed a man of many words that have turned into some of the most famous lines in film history. To embody the surf-obsessed and fearless Colonel Kilgore, the actor delved into his own past in the military, first as the son of a Rear Admiral in the navy and later as a private first class in the army, which he ditched to study acting in New York.

Duvall did plenty of research to build the Kilgore character, basing his performance on officers he served under at Fort Bragg and choosing a cowboy hat to mimic how members of the air calvary in Vietnam sometimes wore mementos from the American West. But it’s the actor’s delivery that everyone remembers, brilliantly going from hot to cold as he lambasts his troops during a bombing campaign, then kneels beside them to calmly state: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” — a sinister line considering the mass death happening all around them, but also perfectly true to character.

The same year Apocalypse Now was released, Duvall played another bigger-than-life military man in The Great Santini, which was shot after the Coppola film and feels at times like a spinoff story for Colonel Kilgore. As the titular antihero and contender for worst screen father of 1979, Duvall embodied a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Marines who settles with his family near a base in South Carolina, where he conducts training sessions and rules over his four children like he’s about to send them off to battle.

There are some classic Duvallian moments in The Great Santini, a movie I recall well because it was one of my dad’s favorites (don’t ask). In the opening scene, Santini — whose real name is “Bull” Meechum — gets wasted at an officer’s dance and fake vomits Campbell’s Soup all over the floor, then has his platoon lick it up in front of all the horrified guests. In what’s probably the film’s highlight, the Colonel plays a long one-on-one basketball game against his oldest son (Michael O’Keefe) that turns so violently competitive, he nearly takes his kid’s head off.

Like Kilgore, Meechum is a professional soldier and all-around tyrant with a voice that resounds like a bullhorn. But Duvall also reveals his weaknesses at key moments, showing how he actually tries hard as a father yet can’t help confusing training soldiers with rearing his own children.

Weakness also characterizes the role that earned Duvall his only Oscar for best actor. As the broken country singer Mac Sledge in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, he became so small on screen that his character almost disappeared amid the Texas flatlands where he washes up after another catastrophic drinking binge. Ditching alcohol and a successful music career to stay on as a handyman at a roadside motel run by a beautiful widow (Tess Harper), Sledge hardly utters a word for the first half of the movie. When he finally speaks, and eventually sings again, it’s with utter grace and sincerity. Duvall was perhaps never better than as a severely wounded man who finds enough inner strength to restart his life, letting go of the two things he loves — music and whiskey — to last another day.

Fans of the star surely have other characters to add to the list, whether big or small or some of both. (I have to confess that I’ve never seen his famous performance in Lonesome Dove, which aired on CBS when I was 12 and earned the actor a Golden Globe.) In his later years, Duvall seemed to say yes to anything, from solid A-list dramas like The Road and Crazy Heart to blockbusters like Gone in 60 Seconds, Deep Impact, The 6th Day and Jack Reacher.

He played it big again one last time in The Apostle, a role he was born to inhabit — and ingeniously did so at the ripe age of 66, in a movie he also wrote and directed. As a Pentecostal preacher with major anger issues, causing him to kill his wife’s lover with a baseball bat at…a Little League game, Duvall portrayed a character who was like an aggregate of all the men he’d played before — flawed and crazy men with good hearts, men who meant well but had a terrible way of demonstrating it. Using his roaring baritone as both a weapon and a healing device, he ultimately gets under our skin in a series of fiery sermons he delivers like monologues accumulated throughout his long career.

Duvall’s brilliance was not only in his versatility, but in the way he could make larger-than-life men like the preacher or Kilgore suddenly seem tiny, undercutting their belligerence with vulnerability or tenderness. And he could make tiny men like Mac Sledge or Tom Hagen stand tall through what they held back, finding strength and stature in their restraint. One memorable late role in which he did the latter was as NYPD Captain Burt Grusinky in James Gray’s crime thriller We Own the Night, in which he played a thoughtful Hagen-like patriarch who gradually loses a handle on his two sons, then dies in spectacular fashion during an ambush on a rain-soaked expressway.

He only had a few lines in that movie, but it was enough to make him an anchor for the drama. The thing about great screen performers like Duvall is that, whether they played it big or small, the scene was often centered on them. It’s the secret that a select few have managed to grasp — especially those who came up alongside him, including the actor’s former roommates, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Each had his own alchemy for drawing our attention. In Duvall’s case, it was about reining in the beast or unleashing it, rip-roaring through scenes or vanishing within them. Barking orders as bombs dropped or receding unforgettably into the dark.

In 1994, the Rev. Jesse Jackson declared war on Hollywood.

The civil rights leader, who died Tuesday, set his sights on the entertainment industry, accusing it of “institutional racism” and calling out what he called the lack of representation of people of color and women, an issue that reverberates today.

Jackson aimed his trademark fiery dynamism at studio and network executives, forming the Rainbow Coalition on Fairness in the Media — an offshoot of his Rainbow Coalition that focused on social justice and economic equality — and threatening boycotts against projects that excluded minorities.

Comparing his campaign to the historic march in Selma, Ala., and other civil rights demonstrations during a news conference, Jackson said, “They think they have the right to not include us in recruitment, hiring, promotion, projection, decision making. But we have consumer power, we have viewer power, we have the power to change dials. … The networks have time now to get their house in order. They can begin to change now.”

The pronouncement was a dramatic contrast to Jackson’s 1984 hosting gig on “Saturday Night Live” and his memorable reading of “Green Eggs and Ham” during a 1991 appearance on the sketch variety series.

But despite his characteristic command and media savvy, Jackson’s campaign never gained true momentum, scoring mixed results. Black actors and creators within Hollywood for the most part failed to rally around him, and leaders of some advocacy groups accused him of losing focus. Whoopi Goldberg made fun of him while hosting the 1996 Oscars.

By 1997, the battle had fizzled out and Jackson had moved on to more political concerns.

The clash with Hollywood was first sparked after several Black-oriented shows on Fox, including “South Central,” “Roc,” “In Living Color” and “The Sinbad Show” were canceled in the July 1994. Jackson felt there would not be much improvement in the diversity on the shows in the upcoming fall season.

“We know that significant shows were cut off from Fox this season, and that is of great concern to us,” Jackson said at a news conference at the African American Community Unity Center where he was accompanied by Brotherhood Crusade founder Danny Bakewell and comedian Sinbad, who starred in his own eponymous sitcom.

And Jackson said it wasn’t the only TV network with this problem. “We look at the data we have on NBC. It is substantial. It is ugly. We look at the projected format for CBS this fall. In the real sense, all of them are recycling racist practices. It is called institutional racism. It is manifest not only in their hiring, but in their priorities.”

He added that he was also concerned about what he claimed was poor representation of people of color and women among network news anchors and on writing staffs on prime-time network series. He criticized the prominence of Black actors having major roles that often involved criminal activity.

“We have written the networks letters, and the response, by and large, has been defensive as they attempt to justify what is unjustifiable,” Jackson said at the news conference. “While we’re willing to talk, we’re also willing to walk. It’s now time for aggressive direct action.”

In a separate interview, he targeted politically oriented Sunday news shows, saying they excluded Black journalists and news figures: “Those all-white hosts determine their guests and set the political agenda for public policy for Monday morning. That’s not America.”

His newly formed commission was researching network hiring practices and minority images. He vowed that boycotts and other actions would take place if there was not significant change.

But those demonstrations never materialized, and no boycotts were called. Roughly a year after his initial declaration, observers inside and outside the industry said networks had mostly ignored Jackson, and that little had changed.

Some leaders at the time questioned his commitment, saying he did not seem truly dedicated to aggressive action.

Sonny Skyhawk, founder and president of American Indians in Film, one of the organizations that had joined forces with Jackson, said the campaign against the networks should have been stronger.

“I would hate to criticize him for not being more diligent, but it is frustrating,” said Skyhawk in a 1995 interview about the initiative. “I don’t know where (the issue) is or why he is not continuing on this. But I think he got sidetracked on a lot of other things.”

Sherrie Mazingo, who was then head of broadcast journalism at USC, said she was not surprised that the Jackson campaign had lost steam: “What happened last season isn’t new, it’s perennial, and may even be cyclical. Protests and accusations and talk like this goes on all the time, and nothing ever happens. Nothing.”

Mazingo cited similar efforts by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in the early 1980s that had attacked Hollywood’s hiring practices. A boycott of films that failed to use Black artists in front of or behind the camera was proposed but never materialized.

“I believe what happens when these things start is that an individual in the organization who is pushing forward on these issues gets tired of banging their head against a brick wall,” Mazingo said. “They make an all-out assault, exhaust a lot of energy and money, and nothing ever significantly changes, except for a token gesture here and there.”

Sumi Haru, who was president of the Assn. of Asian Pacific Artists, said Jackson had been sidetracked by more topical issues such as a conservative power grab in Washington, D.C., and calls for abolishing affirmative action programs.

“He needed to focus his energy on the civil rights initiative, and affirmative action was a much bigger deal,” said Haru.

But Billie Green, president of the Beverly Hills/Hollywood branch of the NAACP, said Jackson’s campaign would have been more effective if it had joined forces with other organizations that had members within the television industry.

Jackson pushed back against the criticism, insisting that the fight against Hollywood “is still very high on our agenda.” He pointed out that he had worked to continue government funding for the Public Broadcasting Service, protested the cancellation of the Nickelodeon series about two Black brothers, “My Brother and Me,” picketed conservative “hate radio” programs and sent out a fax to 8,000 supporters asking them to rally CBS to bring back the family drama “Under One Roof.”

“It’s going to get more intense,” Jackson said.

In 1996, Jackson turned his attention to the Academy Awards, angered that there was only one Black nominee among the 166 artists nominated. He called for picketing in major cities and and said Black people attending the Oscar ceremony should wear a symbol expressing solidarity against what he called Hollywood’s “race exclusion and cultural violence.”

But during the Oscars, which was produced by Quincy Jones, Goldberg, who was hosting, took a swipe at the civil rights leader who was picketing across town.

“Jesse Jackson asked me to wear a ribbon. I got it,” Goldberg said during her opening. “But I had something I want to say to Jesse right here, but he’s not watching, so why bother?” The remark drew applause and laughter from the black-tie audience.

Some leaders, producers and directors were not amused by Goldberg, saying her remarks were insulting and dismissive of a serious fight to gain diversity within the motion picture industry. But others criticized Jackson, calling his action ill-timed and ill-advised. Several of the most prominent African Americans present, including Oprah Winfrey, Sidney Poitier and Laurence Fishburne, did not wear rainbow-colored ribbons as a sign of solidarity with Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition.

Even though he concentrated on other endeavors, Jackson was not totally done with Hollywood. He and the Rev. Al Sharpton spearheaded a protest in 2002 against the comedy “Barbershop” and its jokes about Jackson and ciivil rights icons Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. The two leaders also threatened a boycott against the 2004 comedy “Soul Plane.”

3/5 stars

Continuing this unexpected trend, Panda Plan: The Magical Tribe defies all expectations as a marked improvement on its predecessor in almost every conceivable way.

It jettisons much of the baggage that bogged down the first film in favour of a fanciful jungle adventure that plays to the actor’s enduring strengths as a physical comedian.