Legendary actor dances with style

NEW YORK -- For "Assassination Tango," Robert Duvall and Luciana Pedraza performed a delicate pas de deux on and off-screen.\n"There is always a thin line in any relationship," says Pedraza, Duvall's 31-year-old girlfriend and co-star in this film about a hit man with a passion for the Argentinian national dance. \n"She walked it like this!" interjects Duvall, 72, with a laugh, wobbling like a tightrope walker with outstretched arms.\n"We are so close, and I couldn't cross it," she continues. "I knew that this is his project. There were a lot of times I knew people were doing things that were not right, but you cannot always be so opinionated."\n"I got a little irritated when she didn't tell me things," he says.\nThe couple met in 1997 on the street in Pedraza's hometown of Buenos Aires, where, ironically, it was Duvall who took her on her first visit to a milonga -- a typical Argentinian dance hall. To prepare the actress for her film debut in "Tango," the two did role-playing exercises over the dinner table or even walking down the street. \n"She'd say 'Five minutes of acting.' And I'd say, 'No, let's eat dinner,'" recalls Duvall.\nThey also practiced Argentina's most famous cultural export -- the sultry dance that has enamored Duvall for 15 years.\n"He dances very well," says Alicia Cruzado, who teaches tango at the Argentinian Consulate in New York and has seen Duvall on the dance floor. "He has good posture (so he) can properly embrace the lady. It makes it look like she can fly."\nFancy footwork has not always come naturally to Duvall, who confesses he suffered through "middle-class, white-bread dancing" lessons as an adolescent in Annapolis, Md., and can still "only tap dance with one foot." But now he can be found two-stepping, swing dancing and leading a tango on his 360-acre Revolutionary War-era estate in Virginia, where he lives with Pedraza and their three dogs (a Jack Russell, blond Scottie and Australian cattle dog). \n"Assassination Tango" is the third film that Duvall has written and directed. His last such project, 1997's "The Apostle" earned one of his six Oscar nominations for acting. He won a Best Actor statuette for 1983's country-western drama "Tender Mercies." \n"He's a really great character actor who is so capable that you don't have to work to get the performance from him," says director Barry Levinson, who worked with Duvall on "The Natural." "He is already there, with all of the nuances and shades."\n"Bob is an exciting and accessible actor," says Gil Cates, producer of several Academy Award shows. "You don't have to go through a thesaurus to figure out what he's talking about or doing. He makes people feel things."\nA lot of actors make Duvall feel things as well -- including a certain amount of disgust.