Imparting news of his father’s death, Kiefer Sutherland called him “one of the most important actors in the history of film,” and it’s hard to disagree. Donald Sutherland rode the crest of shifting screen trends for six decades. He never stopped working, and was never less than committed and passionate, whether serving his screen apprenticeship in B-movie horror, emerging in the 1970s as a leading man and unlikely sex symbol, segueing into character roles and scene-stealing cameos, or electrifying a new generation as President Coriolanus Snow inThe Hunger Games franchise (2012 to2015).
He was never nominated for an Oscar, though did win an Emmy and Golden Globe for his supporting performance in the HBO filmCitizen X (1995), and another Golden Globe for playing political adviser Clark Clifford in HBO’sPath to War (2002). In 2017, the Academy tried to make up for its neglect by presenting him with an HonoraryAward.
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in New Brunswick, and retained a strong Canadian identity for the rest of his life. He survived bouts of polio and rheumatic fever as a child to grow to a gangly 6 foot 4 inches. When, as a teenager, he asked his mother if he was handsome, she tactfully replied: “Your face hascharacter.”
He studied engineering and drama at the University of Toronto before moving to the UK in 1957. He dropped out of London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) to join the Perth Repertory Theatre and played small roles in British TV series such asThe Saint andThe Avengers. He made his film debut inIl castello dei morti vivi (1964), later naming his first-born son after its writer and co-director, Warren Kiefer. He staked a vampire in the Amicus anthologyDr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), and played a slow-witted handyman in Tallulah Bankhead’s last film,Die! Die! My Darling!(1965).
He was over 30 when he made his breakthrough as Vernon L. Pinkley inThe Dirty Dozen (1967), filmed in the UK. When Clint Walker balked at his character having to impersonate a general, director Robert Aldrich plucked Sutherland out of the “Back Six” to replace him (“You! With the big ears! You do it!”). It led to Sutherland being cast inMASH (1970) as ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce, an insubordinate army surgeon stitching up casualties during the Korean War. Robert Altman’s black comedy tapped into the zeitgeist, was a massive hit and propelled Sutherland and Elliott Gould to stardom. That same year, Sutherland consolidated his status as one of the counterculture’s coolest actors by stealing scenes as hippy tank commander Oddball in another war comedy,Kelly’s Heroes(1970).
Sutherland’s face was not that of a traditional leading man; in old Hollywood he would surely have been cast almost exclusively as villains, like Basil Rathbone. But 1970s New Hollywood was turning convention upside-down, and his Droopy Dog features and ghostly blue eyes proved unexpectedly versatile. He could play goofy or sinister, grotesque or romantic, misfits or normies, with an astutely deployed half-smile that could be amiable or menacing, sometimes both at once. And he was low-key sexy in pyjamas as the eponymous private eye in Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir conspiracy thrillerKlute (1971), after which he and his co-star Jane Fonda embarked on an anti-Vietnam War tour, recorded in the documentaryFTA (1972). The CIA put him on its watch list, though it didn’t seem to harm his career, and he remained a lifelong anti-waractivist.
He was devastating as the bereaved father in Nicolas Roeg’s occult thrillerDon’t Look Now (1973), and almost unbearably tender in the infamous sex scene with Julie Christie; creepy but heartbreaking as lovelorn accountant ‘Homer Simpson’ inThe Day of the Locust (1975); evil incarnate as fascist foreman Attila in Bernardo Bertolucci’s1900 (1976); tragicomic and haunted asFellini’s Casanova (1976), the Italian director memorably describing his leading actor as “a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of amasturbator”.
He played the sympathetic everyman protagonist in Philip Kaufman’sInvasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), with its shocking, much-memed ending. He returned to his native Canada to act opposite his third wife, Francine Racette, as a contract killer in Stuart Cooper’s dreamy, crypticThe Disappearance (1977), and as Steve Carella inBlood Relatives (1978), Claude Chabrol’s chilly adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel transplanted toQuebec.
He played another bereaved father in Robert Redford’s directing debutOrdinary People (1980), but curiously, his superb performance didn’t even get an Oscar nomination in a film that was otherwise showered with them. Sutherland imbued all his characters (except perhaps Attila) with credibly human dimensions, which stood him in good stead when he played, for example, Nazi spies plying unwitting British women with his off-kilter sex appeal inThe Eagle Has Landed (1976) andEye of the Needle(1981).
Sutherland’s career hit the nearest thing to a lean patch in the 1980s. Playing the villain in Hugh Hudson’s clunky period epicRevolution (1985) did nothing for his career, but his cult credentials were reaffirmed with an appearance as Wilhelm Reich in the music video for Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’ (1985). He made a powerful impression in Euzhan Palcy’s anti-apartheid dramaA Dry White Season (1989) and proved he didn’t need a leading role to steal the show inBackdraft (1991) as a convictedpyromaniac.
He gave an elegant masterclass in how to deliver conspiracy theory exposition dump in Oliver Stone’sJFK (1991), imbued his Manhattan art dealer in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (1993) with unexpected nuance, and gleefully revisited his B-movie roots for John Bruno’sVirus (1999). Among his latterday patriarch performances he was deeply moving as Mr Bennet in Joe Wright’sPride & Prejudice(2005).
On CBS’s60 Minutes in 2017, Anderson Cooper asked Sutherland where he found inspiration for his roles. The actor responded: “I don’t find it. It finds me. I mean, I will read it. And suddenly, it starts churning around inside me. And, then, it gets violent. And, then, it gets loving. And it’s an extraordinary thing. It gets more and more and more exciting. It’s delicious.” And for us, the audience, it has never been less than delicious towatch.
Donald Sutherland, 18 July 1935 to 20 June2024
