Donald Sutherland, the prolific Canadian actor who rose to fame with the irreverent anti-war classic “MASH” and captivated audiences with his dramatic performances in films such as “Ordinary People” and “Don't Look Now,” has died.
A Hollywood mainstay for more than six decades, Sutherland died Thursday in Miami after a long illness, his agency confirmed in a statement. He was 88 years old.
Son Kiefer Sutherland also confirmed his father's death “with a heavy heart” in a statement Thursday morning on social media. “He personally seems to me to be one of the most important actors in the history of cinema. I was never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and you can never ask for more than that. A life well lived.”
Donald Sutherland's work showcased his transformative range, moving comfortably from drama to comedy and jumping between heavier and lighter roles with ease. Standing 6-foot-4 with white hair and piercing blue eyes, he was hard to miss whether he was playing a quirky weirdo, an icy tyrant, or a sadistic villain. In total, he had nearly 200 roles in film or television.
“It's the characters that make the pictures,” he told The Times in 1995. “Basically, my job is to provide information about them.”
Deep into his career, as he shifted between lead and character roles, Sutherland thrived in smaller roles that typically required an older actor who had long since been typecast as a villain or eccentric sidekick. But Sutherland had the winning ability to transform those small roles into complex characters that often helped elevate the film.
On the small screen, Sutherland also appeared in “Human Trafficking,” “Commander in Chief,” “Dirty Sexy Money,” “Pillars of the Earth” and “Trust.” Although he originally intended to be a stage actor, his only Broadway appearance was in the short-lived adaptation of Edward Albee's “Lolita” in 1981.
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in St. John, a small fishing town in New Brunswick, Canada, on July 17, 1935. The town had only 5,000 residents, he said, and “that's when the train came into town.” One of four children, his mother was a mathematician and his father was a salesman.
He initially planned to be an engineer and attended Victoria College in Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in engineering and theatre. It was also where he met his first wife, Lois Hardwick. His love of acting began in a Nova Scotia movie theater when he was a teenager, but film acting seemed like too much of an activity, so he tried his hand at theater.
“It's not that theater was my first love. My first love was just being an actor,” he told The Times. “I was a bit dumb and cowardly, and I didn't think movies were something I could be a part of. I don't know why I assumed the theater would be there. I guess it was more normal.
He moved to England in 1956 to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but dropped out after nine months because he did not like the psychological approach to acting. She continued to tour with various repertory companies and appeared in several BBC television productions, including small roles in “The Saint” and “The Avengers.”
Rejection became all too familiar. When she tried to break onto the big screen in 1962, she came away thinking her audition had gone well. The next morning the director called him on the phone. “The role we are casting is a boy who lives next door,” the director said. “It doesn't sound like you've ever lived next door to anyone.”
He finally made his first film, “Castle of the Living Dead,” in 1964 and followed it with a series of mediocre films like “Dr. The House of Horrors of Terror” and “Die! Die! My love!” Her break came when she came to Hollywood in 1967, a year after her first marriage ended, to co-star in the 1968 thriller “The Split.”
“We had no money,” said Sutherland, who by then was married to his second wife, actress Shirley Douglas. (They divorced in 1970.) He then called his “Oedipus Rex” co-star, Christopher Plummer, of “Sound of Music” fame, who was working in Stratford, Canada, to get his opinion.
“I woke him up,” Sutherland told The Times in 2011. “He lent me $1,500. Incredible. We were on a Boeing 707: Shirley and her son Tom. Kiefer and [his twin] Rachel was probably 3 or 4 months old. “She was wearing a raincoat and was holding Kiefer, and when we landed in Los Angeles, he threw up on me.”
Donald Sutherland and his son Kiefer Sutherland photographed in 2016.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
The actor used a clip from his appearance in “The Saint” to land a role in his first major American film, “The Dirty Dozen,” in 1967. Sutherland credited legendary producer Ingo Preminger and director Robert Aldrich, who supervised the 1967 World War II film, for landing his subsequent role in the film “MASH.”
“I was a glorified extra” in “The Dirty Dozen,” Sutherland said. “They hired legitimate actors to play the bottom six of the dozen.”
But he quickly rose to fame in 1970 as the cocky surgeon Captain Hawkeye Pierce in “MASH” and then as the neurotic platoon commander Oddball in “Kelly's Heroes.” He later appeared in such seminal films as Alan J. Pakula's mysterious “Klute,” Bernardo Bertolucci's epic “1900” and Federico Fellini's “Casanova.”
Featured roles continued to appear with “The Eagle Has Landed,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Day of the Locust” and the 1973 occult thriller “Don't Look Now,” which generated controversy for a film about sex. scene with Sutherland and Julie Christie that was unusually graphic for its time.
After being a leading man for most of the 1970s, Sutherland began alternating between leading roles in films such as “A Dry White Season” with Marlon Brando and Robert Redford's Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” and supporting roles. characters in movies like “JFK.” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
He also appeared in smaller films that nevertheless became cult favorites, including “Animal House,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and National Lampoon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
His role as the villainous leader President Coriolanus Snow alongside Jennifer Lawrence in the hit “Hunger Games” trilogy gave him a new wave of recognition among younger audiences.
“It was funny,” Sutherland told The Times in 2017, “at the beginning of 'The Hunger Games,' walking through an airport and suddenly you feel this tug and you look down and it's a young person, always a girl, never a girl. boy. And his mother is standing there and they say, 'Could you take a picture with my daughter?' And we were next to each other and I was looking at the camera and the girl was like, 'Could you look mean?' “
Despite his extensive resume, Sutherland was short on accolades, winning only a few major awards for his performances: an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the 1995 miniseries “Citizen X” and another Globe for 2002's “Path to War.” But the lack of awards season hardware didn't seem to worry him.
“My career has been going downhill since I was 11 years old. I did my first play, 'The Male Animal', at the Hart House theater at the University of Toronto. The audience laughed and applauded when I entered, applauded when I left, and applauded when I reentered. I’ve never had it so good since,” she said.
In 2017 he received an honorary Oscar, which recognizes extraordinary distinction for his career and exceptional contributions to the state of cinematic arts and sciences.
The actor's brief romance with Jane Fonda after making “Klute” in 1971 introduced him to left-wing politics and a second career as an aggressive activist. The two had met at a Black Panther Party benefit in Los Angeles, where he expressed his opposition to the Vietnam War. Sutherland, Fonda, and other anti-war activists formed Free Theater Associates as an alternative to Bob Hope's USO tours in Vietnam. Documents declassified in 2017 revealed that the CIA had placed him on a watch list due to his anti-war activities.
Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore star in the 1980 film “Ordinary People,” directed by Robert Redford.
(Paramount Studios)
Watching his father's seminal films was a revelation for Kiefer Sutherland, who came to appreciate his father's work as a teenager. “I knew he was a famous actor, but I didn't know how prolific he was. He didn't know how diverse all those characters were.”
The younger Sutherland, best known for his starring role in the television drama “24,” said he even called his father to apologize for not knowing the magnitude of his career.
The two Sutherlands appeared in Joel Schumacher's 1996 thriller “A Time to Kill,” but did not share any scenes. That changed when they played an estranged father and son in the western “Forsaken” in 2015.
Sutherland said he generally didn't watch his films after they were released, but when he did, he said he saw room for improvement.
“I have to be honest: I still look forward when I look back. All I see are mistakes,” he told The Times. “When you are working on an image, all your concentration, all your intensity is directed towards the heart of it, to such a point that it burns inside you. Then when it's over, it's gone.”
Sutherland is survived by his wife Francine Racette; sons Roeg, Rossif, Angus and Kiefer; his daughter Rachel and four grandchildren, including “Veep” actress Sarah Sutherland.
