Robert Duvall’s famous line from his role as Lieutenant Colonel “Bill” Kilgore in 1979’s Apocalypse Now remains one of cinema’s most memorable—despite being mangled in later years by President Donald Trump.
Screenwriter John Milius told CNN that the line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” was just something that came to him while writing the script for Apocalypse Now, which would go on to win the Cannes Film Festival Palm d’Or, and garner eight Academy Award nominations, winning two.
“I just wrote it—it just came up,” said Milius. “That’s what happens. People love to think that all this stuff happens when you write a famous line—that you really thought about it a lot.”
While it may have seemed like any other line of dialogue on the page to Milius, it was Duvall, who died on Sunday at the age of 95, who delivered it in such a way that it would be immortalized in film history.
Duvall’s wife, Luciana DuVall, announced his death on Facebook on Monday.
“To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything,” she wrote. “For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented.”
Duvall’s stunning performance in Apocalypse Now would earn him his third of six Oscar nominations. (He won the Best Actor Oscar for 1983’s Tender Mercies).
Legendary critic Roger Ebert described Duvall’s line in Apocalypse Now as “unforgettable” in his 1999 re-review of the film, as he praised Duvall’s “frightening emptiness” in the role. The line would later be ranked at number 12 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes list.
For Duvall’s Kilgore the smell of napalm equates to the smell of victory and shows the soldier’s detachment from the destruction the war is causing.
In an essay to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary, Empire declared DuVall’s performance as “Col. ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’ Kilgore” as one of the “great military loonies of all time.”
Australia’s Museum of Screen Culture called Duvall’s line one of the “most iconic lines in cinema history,” in “one of the most striking and iconic scenes in cinema history,” as it “demonstrated the immorality and absurdity of the Vietnam War, embodied by Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore.”
Trump famously offended military veterans in 2017 by botching the line as “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning,” during a meeting with various veterans’ organizations, and then wasted several minutes arguing about what the real famous line was.
He would later make another ill-fated reference to the film in September 2025, by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Duvall’s character with the Truth Social caption, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” as he threatened Chicago.
The enduring legacy of the film and Duvall’s iconic performance in it lives on, however, as fans continue to quote the line to this day. Duvall himself enjoyed its impact.
“That was a wonderful line,” he told NPR in 2024, “People come up to me and quote it to me and say it like it’s such an in thing between just me and them, and like they’re the only ones that ever thought of it. But that happens with everybody the same way.”
He revealed that he almost missed out on the chance to play Kilgore in the Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece.
“I think the part was offered to somebody else, and they turned it down. And I said to Francis, I know the part’s written for a bigger guy—real tall, big guy, rugged. But, you know, I’ll just say once. I think maybe I could do the part, and I’ll put in my plea. And he gave it to me.“
He concluded, “It was enjoyable. It was a lovely part, and I enjoyed playing it very much.”
