Donald Sutherland 1935 – 2024 - ‘One of the most important actors in the history of film’

21 Jun 2024 - The Guardian

Andrew Pulver

Donald Sutherland, whose acting career spanned six decades and included films such as Don’t Look Now, M*A*S*H and The Hunger Games, has died in Miami after a long illness, aged 88, his representatives said.

His son, the actor Kiefer Sutherland, also shared the news on X. “With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away,” he wrote. “I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived.”

Sutherland appeared in more than 190 films and TV shows and embodied an off-kilter appeal that served him brilliantly in a series of classic 1970s movies, which gradually evolved into a veteran gravitas in the latter stages of his career. He did not win a major award for any of his film roles – and was never nominated for a conventional Oscar – but he did win two Golden Globes for best supporting actor for the TV movies Citizen X (in 1996) and Path to War (in 2003). Sutherland received an honorary Oscar in 2017.

Born in Canada in 1935, Sutherland studied engineering and drama at the University of Toronto, and moved to London in 1957 to join the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). After small roles on British TV shows, Sutherland was cast in the action film The Dirty Dozen, as one of a group of prisoners trained for a dangerous mission during the second world war.

The Dirty Dozen was a hit and he appeared in two more war films with anti-heroic sensibilities: the massively influential Korean-war comedy M*A*S*H, in which Sutherland played the rule-bending surgeon “Hawkeye” Pierce, and Kelly’s Heroes, as a whacked-out tank commander who joins Clint Eastwood’s bank robbery.

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, called Sutherland a “truly great Canadian artist”, while the two-time Oscar-winning actor Michael Douglas, who starred in the 1994 film Disclosure alongside Sutherland, shared a picture of the pair together on Instagram, saying: “What a lovely, talented, and curious man. RIP Donald Sutherland.”

Sutherland’s work became more radical later in his career: he played the title role in Klute, opposite Jane Fonda’s sex worker, as a detective investigating a murder in the first of director Alan J Pakula’s so-called “paranoia trilogy” and appeared with Fonda in the anti-Vietnam war documentary FTA. In 2017, declassified documents showed that Sutherland, a vocal anti-war activist, was on the National Security Agency’s “watch list” between 1971 and 1973.

In 1973 he starred opposite Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, the Nicolas Roeg-directed psychological horror, which contained a then-infamous sex scene, intercut with Christie and Sutherland getting dressed, which Sutherland was repeatedly forced to deny was authentic. He starred in Federico Fellini’s Casanova, played murderous fascist Attila Melanchini in Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic 1900, and featured alongside Michael Caine as a duplicitous IRA man in the war thriller The Eagle Has Landed.

He played a dope-smoking professor in National Lampoon’s Animal House, and fought “pod people” in a remake of the horror sci-fi Invasion of the Body Snatchers – giving rise to a popular gif of the film’s final moments.

In the 1980s and 90s his roles included an art dealer in Six Degrees of Separation, the mysterious Mr X in Oliver Stone’s JFK and slayer trainer Merrick Jamison-Smythe in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

In 2012 his role as the villainous President Snow in The Hunger Games introduced him to a new generation of film-goers. He also starred in the disaster thriller Moonfall in 2022. Most recently, he had a recurring role in the TV series Lawmen: Bass Reeves with David Oyelowo.

Sutherland was married three times, to Lois Hardwick between 1959 and 1966, Shirley Douglas (19661970) and Francine Racette, whom he married in 1972. His memoir will be published in November.