Donald Sutherland was born in 1935 in Saint John’s New Brunswick, Canada. He has an impressive array of outstaning contribution to films especially in the 1970’s and continues to give sterling performances to-day. He trained for the stage on Britain and began his career in British movies. His movie debut came in 1963 in “The World Ten Times Over”. His other U.K. films include “Fanatic” with Tallulah Bankhead and “Sebastian” with Dirk Bogarde. His international breakthrough role came with “Mash” in 1970. This was followed by “Kelly’s Heroes”, “Alex in Wonderland”, “Don’t Look Now”, “The Day of the Locust”, “The Eagle Has Landed”, “Nothing Personal” and “Eye of the Needle”. he is the father of actor Kiefer Sutherland.
TCM Overview:
Perhaps one of the most prolific and widely recognized actors of his generation, Donald Sutherland made a career playing some of the most unusual and memorable characters in cinema history. Though best known for playing odd, off-beat roles, like a hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), an anti-authoritarian surgeon in “M*A*S*H” (1970), a novice private investigator in “Klute” (1971) and a stoner college professor in “Animal House” (1978), Sutherland cut a wide swath of characters throughout his career, mainly in order to avoid being typecast as eccentric weirdos. Critical acclaim for several of his performances – especially “Ordinary People” (1980) and “JFK” (1991) – was abundant, but he rarely received any awards – a surprising revelation given the breadth and quality of his work. Nonetheless, Sutherland maintained a steady career despite a long lull in the mid-1980s, even expanding his horizons into series television with “Commander in Chief” (ABC, 2005-06) and “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-09); two projects that, although short-lived, earned him further critical raves. Boasting a career that spanned more than five decades and 150 productions, Sutherland established himself as one of the most prolific, inventive and respected actors ever to grace either screen.
Born on July 17, 1935 in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, Sutherland was raised in neighboring Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. His father, Frederick, was a salesman and head of the local bus, gas and electric company, and his mother, Dorothy, was a mathematics teacher. When he was 14, Sutherland was heard on CKBW as the youngest news reader and disc jockey in Canada. After high school, he studied engineering at the University of Toronto, but he quickly made the switch to an English major and began acting in school productions, making his stage debut in “The Male Animal” in 1952. He graduated UT in 1956, then moved to England where he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. He went immediately to work in provincial repertory companies, landing roles in several stage productions in London, including “August for the People.” Sutherland was performing in a West End production of “Spoon River Anthology” when he was offered his first film, the dual role of a soldier and a witch (who end up fighting each other at the end) in “Castle of the Living Dead” (1964).
A couple of years after his film debut, Sutherland had moved to the United States where he continued taking strides to advance his career. He made his first American screen appearance in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), playing a one of 12 soldiers in military prison during World War II, who are sent on a dangerous mission that gives them the chance to regain their honor. After bit parts in “Sebastian” (1968) and “Oedipus the King” (1968), Sutherland landed meatier supporting roles in “Joanna” (1968) and “Interlude” (1968). Then, without really meaning to, Sutherland suddenly made a name for himself in Robert Altman’s Korean War satire “M*A*S*H” (1970), playing misfit surgeon Hawkeye Pearce, whose love of nurses and moonshine martinis were the only things keeping him and fellow surgeon Trapper John McIntyre (Elliott Gould) sane amidst the chaos of war. Because of the antiwar fervor of the late-1960s, early-1970s, “M*A*S*H” was one of the year’s biggest hits, both critically and financially, turning an unknown Sutherland into an overnight star.
Hot on the heels of “M*A*S*H,” Sutherland was seen in yet another war-themed comedy, “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970), playing one of his most notorious and ultimately beloved characters, Oddball, a Bohemian tank commander who joins forces with a ragtag group of Army soldiers (led by Telly Savalas and Clint Eastwood) on a mission 30 miles behind Nazi lines to steal a large cache of gold. He achieved his first substantial critical acclaim for an excellent performance as a rural private detective who follows the sordid life of a prostitute (Jane Fonda) while on the trail of a killer in “Klute” (1971). Throughout the decade, Sutherland, despite his best efforts, was in danger of being typecast as a stoned-out goofball or an off-the-wall freak, thanks in large part to his rather unconventional looks. Luckily, he had both the sense and the talent to transcend the problem. In “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971), Sutherland was Jesus Christ, while in “Steelyard Blues” (1973), he was a demolition driver released from prison after serving time for larceny, and who gathers a band of misfits together to restore an old World War II plane in which to fly away to live in a nonconformist world.
Despite having made his name with “M*A*S*H” and “Klute” – both critical successes – Sutherland managed to make his share of duds, like “Lady Ice” (1973) and “S*P*Y*S” (1974), a ridiculously dull espionage comedy that reunited him with Elliot Gould. He was rather one-note as an ambitious and wealthy Hollywood powerbroker in the otherwise worthy adaptation of John Schlesinger’s entertainment satire, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), before returning to the comfortable confines of World War II action in “The Eagle Had Landed” (1976), playing an English-hating Irishman who helps arrange a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill on British soil. After being cast as an everyman Casanova in “Il Casanova di Federico Fellini” (1976) and appearing briefly in the often uproarious spoof “Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977), Sutherland scored another landmark role, playing a pot smoking college professor who takes the girlfriend (Karen Allen) away from an irresponsible, but irrepressible fraternity leader (Tim Matheson) in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1978). Sutherland was once again memorable in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1978), bringing forth a palpable paranoia as a Department of Health employee contending with an alien invasion of soul-possessing spores.
Sutherland forever obliterated being typecast with his subtle portrayal of an emotionally conflicted father in “Ordinary People” (1980), director Robert Redford’s extraordinary Oscar-winning look at a so-called perfect family. Though ultimately overlooked by the Academy Awards, Sutherland was exceptional as a family man dealing with the death of a child and the love for his wife (Mary Tyler Moore). Unfortunately, his critical success with “Ordinary People” failed to translate into other meaty roles; instead leading to the miserable satire “Gas” (1981) and the rather uninspired caper comedy “Crackers” (1984). Meanwhile, an ill-received stage performance as Humbert Humbert in Edward Albee’s “Lolita” in 1981 helped keep him off the stage for a good 18 years – critics savaged the play, forcing the production to be canceled after only 12 performances. Sutherland, on the other hand, was spared from most of the critical drubbing the play received. After a 15 year absence, he returned to the small screen to play Ethan Hawley, a grocery store clerk who dreams of buying back his store from corrupt local bankers, in “John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent” (CBS, 1983), one of the few highlights for Sutherland in the 1980s.
While he remained prolific throughout the decade, Sutherland was mired in career doldrums that made his earlier successes more out of focus with time. Unexceptional features like the uneven murder mystery “Ordeal by Innocence” (1984), the flat-out dull period epic “Revolution” (1985), and the ineptly unfunny espionage comedy “The Trouble With Spies” (1987) only helped give rise to the notion that Sutherland’s career was in trouble. He returned to more dramatic fare with “A Dry White Season” (1989), playing a South African schoolteacher ignorant of the horrors of apartheid and who turns radically against the system when his gardener’s son is viciously murdered. Once the 1990s rolled around, however, Sutherland suddenly found himself in better films. He had a small, but integral role in “JFK” (1991), playing the mysterious Mr. X, a former black ops officer who feeds vital background information to New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the only person to bring a trial in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Despite being onscreen for only 15 minutes, Sutherland’s compelling performance made an indelible impression and remained one of the most remembered sequences in Oliver Stone’s exceptional film.
After a series of high-profile, but ultimately forgettable roles in “Backdraft” (1991), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992) and “Outbreak” (1995), Sutherland received rare award recognition for his performance in “Citizen X” (HB0, 1995), an exceptional thriller about an eight-year investigation by an obsessed Russian detective (Stephen Rea) into the serial killings of 52 women and children. Sutherland received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for his portrayal of Colonel Fetisov, the investigator’s supportive boss who helps him fight the bureaucracy of the Soviet state. Building off that success, he was superb as the law school professor and mentor of a novice lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) in “A Time to Kill” (1996), then gave an understated and overlooked performance as famed track coach Bill Bowerman in “Without Limits” (1998), an engaging look at the ill-fated track star, Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup). Sutherland rounded out the millennium with more underwhelming projects, including the mediocre features “Fallen” (1998) and “Virus” (1999), and the above average made-for-television movie, “Behind the Mask” (CBS, 1999), in which he played a doctor who forms a father-son relationship with a mentally-challenged man (Matthew Fox).
Alongside charismatic turns as a sex-minded, over-the-hill astronaut in Clint Eastwood’s amusing “Space Cowboys” (2000), and as William H. Macy’s hit man father in “Panic” (2000), Sutherland occasionally slummed his way through routine big screen thrillers, including the easily dismissed Wesley Snipes action thriller, “The Art of War” (2000). He continued finding compelling roles on television, however, namely as a small time hood looking to make a big score in “The Big Heist” (2001), and as Clark Clifford, political advisor to Lyndon Johnson, in John Frankenheimer’s acclaimed “Path to War” (HBO, 2002). In 2003, Sutherland enjoyed a renaissance on the big screen, delivering a charming performance as the mentor to a professional thief (Mark Wahlberg) in the hit remake “The Italian Job” (2003), and as Nicole Kidman’s doting Southern dad in “Cold Mountain” (2003). In “Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot” (TNT, 2004), he played a sinister old man who deals in antiques and has taken residence in a haunted mansion on a hill. Though not as frightening as the original made-for-television version, this new rendition nonetheless delivered plenty of chills. Sutherland continued the horror trend with yet another version of “Frankenstein” (Hallmark, 2004), though this particular version remained faithful to Mary Shelley’s original novel.
Taking a different turn on the small screen, he appeared as a regular in his first scripted series, “Commander In Chief” (ABC, 2005-06), a political drama about a female vice president (Geena Davis) who assumes the presidency after the death of her predecessor. Sutherland played the right-wing Speaker of the House and next in line for the job, who tries to convince the vice president to step aside so he can grab hold the reigns of power. He then earned his second Emmy award nomination in a supporting role in the miniseries, “Human Trafficking” (Lifetime, 2005), starring Robert Carlyle and Mira Sorvino, before playing the Bennett family patriarch in the lively adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (2005). While Sutherland maintained a steady supporting presence on the big screen, his fate on “Commander in Chief” suddenly became uncertain in early 2006. Though critically acclaimed, the show steadily lost its audience over the course of its first and only season because of faulty scheduling and a revolving door of showrunners who continually changed the series’ tone and direction.
By May 2006, when ABC pulled the series from the lineup for the all-important sweeps, Sutherland expressed deep disappointment with the show’s inevitable cancellation and the diminishing of his character into a cartoonish villain through clever editing. Despite a nomination for Best Supporting Actor at the 2006 Golden Globe Awards, Sutherland was not seen playing Speaker of the House the next fall. Meanwhile, Sutherland had a small and rather clandestine role as a mysterious colonel who keeps a watchful eye on an international arms dealer (Nicolas Cage) on the verge of a breakdown in the under-appreciated “Lord of War” (2005). After appearing as part of the ensemble cast in “American Gun” (2005), a series of interwoven stories commenting on the proliferation of guns in America and their impact on society, Sutherland played the patriarch of an early-19th century family terrorized by an evil spirit in “An American Haunting” (2006).
After a co-starring role in “Reign Over Me” (2007), a compelling drama about two former college roommates (Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler) coping with life after 9/11, Sutherland played a billionaire with a mega-yacht who is convinced by a good-natured surf bum (Matthew McConaughey) to join him on a treasure hunt for several chests of gold in “Fool’s Gold” (2008). Back on television, he was delightful as the patriarch of a wealthy, but dysfunctional Manhattan family whose secrets are protected by an idealistic young lawyer (Peter Krause) in “Dirty Sexy Money” (ABC, 2007-09). Sutherland earned plenty of critical kudos and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television. Sutherland went from ultra-modern New York to 12th century England when he portrayed the doomed Bartholomew, Earl of Shiring, in the miniseries adaptation of Ken Follett’s epic novel “The Pillars of the Earth” (Starz, 2010). The following year, he lent big screen support to “The Mechanic” (2011), a remake of the Charles Bronson thriller starring Jason Statham, and the Roman centurion adventure tale “The Eagle” (2011), starring Channing Tatum. Sutherland once again played the villain, this time portraying President Coriolanus Snow in “The Hunger Games” (2012), the autocratic leader of a futuristic America where adolescents are forced into a life-or-death competition as entertainment for the masses.
guardian obituary
Donald Sutherland, who has died aged 88, brought his disturbing and unconventional presence to bear in scores of films after his breakthrough role of Hawkeye Pierce, the army surgeon in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), one of the key American films of its period. It marked Sutherland out as an iconoclastic figure of the 60s generation, but he matured into an actor who made a speciality of portraying taciturn, self-doubting characters. This was best illustrated in his portrayal of the tormented parent of a drowned girl, seeking solace in a wintry Venice, in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), and of the weak, nervous, concerned father of a guilt-ridden teenage boy (Timothy Hutton) in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980).
Although Sutherland appeared in the statutory number of stinkers that are many a film actor’s lot, he was always watchable. His career resembled a man walking a tightrope between undemanding parts in potboilers and those in which he was able to take risks, such as the title role in Federico Fellini’sCasanova (1976)
Curiously, it was Sutherland’s ears that first got him noticed, in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). During the shoot, according to Sutherland, “Clint Walker sticks up his hand and says, ‘Mr Aldrich, as a representative of the Native American people, I don’t think it’s appropriate to do this stupid scene where I have to pretend to be a general.’ Aldrich turns and points to me and says, ‘You with the big ears. You do it’ … It changed my life.” In other words, it led to M*A*S*H and stardom.
Sutherland and his M*A*S*H co-star Elliott Gould were at odds with Altman because they did not think the director knew what he was doing due to his unorthodox methods. In the early days, Sutherland was known to have confrontations with his directors. “What I was trying to do all the time was to impose my thinking,” he remarked some years later. “Now I contribute. I offer. I don’t put my foot down.”
Sutherland, who was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, was a sickly child who battled rheumatic fever, hepatitis and polio. He spent most of his teenage years in Nova Scotia where his father, Frederick, ran a local gas, electricity and bus company; his mother, Dorothy (nee McNichol), was a maths teacher. He attended Bridgewater high school, then graduated from Victoria College, part of the University of Toronto, with a double major in engineering and drama. As a result of a highly praised performance in a college production of James Thurber’s and Elliott Nugent’s The Male Animal, he dropped the idea of becoming an engineer and decided to pursue acting
With this in mind, he left Canada for the UK in 1957 to study at Lamda (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art), where he was considered too tall and ungainly to get anywhere. However, he gained a year’s work as a stage actor with the Perth repertory company, and appeared in TV series such as The Saint and The Avengers. He was Fortinbras in a 1964 BBC production of Hamlet, shot at Elsinore castle and starring Christopher Plummer. He also appeared at the Criterion theatre in the West End in The Gimmick in 1962.
In 1959 he married Lois Hardwick; they divorced in 1966. Then he married the film producer Shirley Douglas, with whom he had twins, Kiefer and Rachel; they divorced in 1971. Kiefer, who grew up to become a celebrated actor, was named after the producer-writer Warren Kiefer, who put Sutherland in an Italian-made Gothic horror film, The Castle of the Living Dead (1964). Christopher Lee played a necrophile count, while Sutherland doubled as a dim-witted police sergeant and, in drag and heavy makeup, as a witch.
In an earlier era, the gawky Sutherland might not have achieved the stardom that followed the anarchic M*A*S*H, but Hollywood at the time was open for stars with unconventional looks, and Sutherland was much in demand for eccentric roles throughout the 70s.
He was impressive as a moviemaker with “director’s block” in Paul Mazursky’s messy but interesting Alex in Wonderland (1970), which contains a prescient dream sequence in which his titular character meets Fellini. In the same year, Sutherland played a Catholic priest and the object of Geneviève Bujold’s erotic gaze in Act of the Heart; he was the appropriately named Sergeant Oddball, an anachronistic hippy tank commander, in the second world war action-comedy Kelly’s Heroes; and he and Gene Wilderwere two pairs of twins in 18th-century France in the broad comedy Start the Revolution Without Me.
Sutherland was at his most laconic, sometimes verging on the soporific, in the title role of Alan J Pakula’s Klute (1971), as a voyeuristic ex-policeman investigating the disappearance of a friend and getting deeply involved with a prostitute, played by Jane Fonda.
Sutherland and Fonda were teamed up again as a couple of misfits in the caper comedy Steelyard Blues (1973). It initially had a limited distribution due mainly to their participation together in the anti-Vietnam war troop show FTA (Fuck the Army), which Sutherland co-directed, co-scripted and co-produced.
Sutherland always made his political views known, although they surfaced only occasionally in his films. In among the many mainstream comedies and thrillers was Roeg’s supernatural drama Don’t Look Now, in which Sutherland and Julie Christie are superb as a couple grieving their dead daughter. Despite the dark subject matter, the film was notable for containing “one of the sexiest love scenes in film history”, according to Scott Tobias in the Guardian, the frank depiction of their love-making coming “like a desert flower poking through concrete”. The actor so admired Roeg that he named another son after him, one of his three sons with the French-Canadian actor Francine Racette, whom he married in 1972
John Schlesinger’s rambling version of The Day of the Locust (1975) saw Sutherland as a sexually repressed character – called Homer Simpson – who tramples a woman to death in an act of uncontrolled rage. Perhaps Bernardo Bertolucci had that in mind when he cast Sutherland in 1900 (Novecento, 1976), in which he is a broadly caricatured fascist thug who shows his sadism by smashing a cat’s head against a post and bashing a young boy’s brains out. “And I turned down Deliverance and Straw Dogs because of the violence!” Sutherland recalled.
In Fellini’s Casanova, the second of his two bizarre Italian excursions in 1976, Sutherland calculates seduction under his heavily made-up features. The performance, as stylised as it is, still reveals the suffering soul within the sex machine.
In 1978 he appeared in Claude Chabrol’s Blood Relatives, a made-in-Canada murder mystery with Sutherland playing a Montreal cop investigating the murder of a young woman. More commercial was The Eagle Has Landed (1976), with Sutherland, attempting an Irish accent, as an IRA member supporting the Germans during the second world war, and as a chilling Nazi in Eye of the Needle (1981). Meanwhile, he was the hero of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), who resists the insidious alien menace until the film’s devastating final shot.
In 1981 Sutherland returned to the stage, as Humbert Humbert in a highly anticipated version of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, adapted by Edward Albee. It turned out to be a huge flop, running only 12 performances on Broadway. Both Sutherland and Albee played the blame game. “The second act is flawed,” Sutherland said. “Albee was supposed to have rethought it, but he never did.” Albee told reporters that he had scuttled some of his best scenes because they were “too difficult” for Sutherland because “he hasn’t been on stage for 17 years”.
Continuing his film career, Sutherland played a complex and sadistic British officer in Hugh Hudson’s Revolution (1985), and in A Dry White Season (1989) he took the role of an Afrikaner schoolteacher beginning to understand the brutal realities of apartheid. In Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), he held the screen with an extended monologue as he spilled the conspiracy beans to Kevin Costner’s district attorney hero Jim Garrison.
After having made contact with young audiences in the 70s with offbeat appearances in gross-out pictures The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) and National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978), the latter as a pot-smoking professor, he was cast as an unconvincing bearded stranger in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992).
On a more adult level were Six Degrees of Separation (1993), in which he played an unfulfilled art dealer; A Time to Kill (1996), as an alcoholic lawyer (alongside Kiefer); Without Limits (1998), as an enthusiastic athletics coach; and Space Cowboys (2000), as an elderly pilot. By this time, he was gradually moving into grey-haired character roles, one of the best being his amiable Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005).
The Jane Austen novel was also featured in the television series Great Books (1993-2000), to which Sutherland lent his soothing voice as narrator. Other series in which he shone as quasi baddies were Commander in Chief (2005) – as the sexist Republican speaker of the house opposed to the new president (Geena Davis) – and Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09), in which he played a powerful patriarch of a wealthy family
Sutherland continued to be active well into his 80s, his long grey hair and beard signifying sagacity, whether as a contract killer in The Mechanic, a Roman hero in The Eagle, a nutty retired poetry professor in Man on the Train (all 2011), or a quirky bounty hunter in the western Dawn Rider (2012), bringing more depth to the characters than they deserved. As President Coriolanus Snow, the autocratic ruler of the dystopian country of Panem in The Hunger Games (2012), Sutherland was discovered by a new generation; he went on to reprise the role in three further films in that franchise, beginning with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013).
He played artists in two art-world thrillers by Italian directors: in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Deception, AKA The Best Offer (2013), he was a would-be painter helping to execute multimillion-dollar scams, while in Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) he was on the other side of the heist as a reclusive genius targeted by a wealthy and unscrupulous dealer (Mick Jagger).
Aside from James Gray’s science-fiction drama Ad Astra (also 2019), in which he co-starred with Brad Pitt, Sutherland’s best late work was all for television. In Danny Boyle’s mini-series Trust (2018), which covered the same real-life events as Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, he played J Paul Getty, the oil tycoon whose grandson is kidnapped; while in The Undoing (2020), he was the father of a psychologist (Nicole Kidman), reluctantly putting up bail when her husband (Hugh Grant) is arrested for murder.
For the latter role Sutherland was in the running for a Golden Globe, having received an honorary Oscar in 2017, eight years after Leigh Singer in this newspaper named him as one of the 10 best actors never to have been nominated. “Is it because he’s Canadian?” asked the writer. No matter: Sutherland graced a Canada Post commemorative stamp in 2023.
He is survived by Francine and his children, Kiefer, Rachel, Rossif, Angus and Roeg, and by four grandchildren.
Donald McNichol Sutherland, actor; born 17 July 1935; died 20 June 2024
