DONALD SUTHERLAND 1935-2024 - ‘Shape-shifty’ movie stalwart did it all

After ‘M.A.S.H.’ breakthrough, he had five-decade career with 150-plus roles

21 giu 2024 - The Washington Post

BY ADAM BERNSTEIN

Donald Sutherland, an actor of breathtaking range who became one of the most compelling players in cinema, whether portraying a misfit combat surgeon, an inscrutable cop, a grieving father or a futuristic tyrant, died June 20 in Miami. He was 88.

His agency, CAA, announced the death but did not provide a specific cause.

With his lilting, velvety baritone and ghoulishly expressive features — gangly frame, prominent ears, wolfish smile and chilling green eyes — Mr. Sutherland perhaps unsurprisingly began his movie career in horror films.

From there, he made a leap into eccentric parts in war films, as the dimmest of “The Dirty Dozen” (1967) and the aptly named Sgt. Oddball in “Kelly’s Heroes” (1970). His breakthrough came in 1970 heading the cast of “M.A.S.H.,” a raucous and absurdist antiwar comedy set in a mobile Army hospital. The film became a cultural phenomenon and cannonballed Mr. Sutherland to fame as an intriguing new screen personality.

Film critic Peter Rainer described Mr. Sutherland as “remarkably shape-shifty,” and his more than 150 screen roles over five decades — notably “Klute” (1971), “Animal House” (1978), “Ordinary People” (1980), “Eye of the Needle” (1981), “Backdraft” (1991), “JFK” (1991), “Six Degrees of Separation” (1993) and “The Hunger Games” (2012) — made him one of the most versatile actors of his generation. A Canadian of learned and genteel temperament off-screen, frequently quoting poets including Joseph Brodsky and William Butler Yeats, Mr. Sutherland was less a personality-driven star than a chameleonic performer adaptable to films set in almost any historical era. This timeless quality was perhaps blended to extremes when he portrayed a blackjack-dealing Jesus Christ in “Johnny Got His Gun,” a 1971 drama set during World War I.

With an acting style spanning the low-key naturalistic to the heavily stylized, Mr. Sutherland was valued by peers for the intense commitment to character he brought to Fellini art house dramas, Sylvester Stallone prison lockup fare, Jane Austen adaptations and raunchy slapstick.

A member of the comedy troupe behind the 2006 film “Beerfest” recalled how Mr. Sutherland, in a walk-on role as a hospital patient who still loves his brew, guzzled suds for hours in take after take rather than use a mechanical device to drain the liquid. “Donald Sutherland, being the professional he was, said, ‘My character is drinking beers. I’m going to drink beers,’ ” Steve Lemme told the online publication Inverse.

Mr. Sutherland rarely carried a movie alone, preferring to work within an ensemble or as a soft-spoken counterpart to stars with a more overtly commanding presence, such as Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Sean Connery and Jennifer Lawrence.

His reputation as a workhorse actor known for burying himself within parts — and under ample facial hair — stemmed, in part, from lifelong self-consciousness about his appearance.

“When I was 16,” he often said, “I distinctly remember asking my mother if I was good-looking, and watching her face go absolutely white when she knew she had to confront something she didn’t want to. I wished I’d never asked the question, because she turned and said, ‘No … but your face has a lot of character.’”

He said he was crushed by the response and was further dismayed to have it reinforced when he first tried out for a movie role. As he recalled in interviews, a producer rejected him for a part as a “next door sort of guy” on the grounds that “we don’t think you look like you ever lived next door to anybody.”

Critical to Mr. Sutherland’s success, Rainer said, was the emergence in the late 1960s of filmmakers trying to break out of the straitlaced studio system formula in terms of casting and plotting. Those more liberated filmmakers, including Robert Altman, Paul Mazursky and Nicolas Roeg, took risks by fusing genres and challenging narrative conventions. They valued nimble, adventurous actors capable of playing ambiguous characters who could portray people who seemed relatable but were perhaps more than a little off-kilter.

It also helped that he almost personified the amiable counterculture with his long shaggy blond hair, looseness of mannerisms and stylish “mod” clothing choices. As journalist Guy Flatley described him in 1970, “He presents a rather startling split image: half Christ at the Last Supper and half Mick Jagger at Altamont.”

No film did more for his career than Altman’s “M.A.S.H.,” which alternated between blood-soaked operations and randy high jinks and came to be regarded as an anti-establishment classic. Although set near the front lines in Korea, it was widely seen as a biting and timely critique of the Vietnam War.

With co-conspirator “Trapper” John Mcintyre, another surgeon played by Elliott Gould, Mr. Sutherland’s Dr. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce wears Hawaiian shirts and plays golf in a theater of war, chases women and humiliates regulation-enforcing authority figures with elaborate pranks, all in the name of maintaining sanity amid the insanity of war.

Perhaps no film showcased Mr. Sutherland’s dramatic discipline more than “Klute,” in which he had the title role of a policeman whose interior life is as mysterious as the case he works to solve, involving a business executive who has vanished. It was the least showy of lead roles, as laconic as Hawkeye Pierce was flamboyant, and allowed wide berth for the more demonstrative Fonda, who won an Oscar playing a cynical call girl possibly connected to the missing executive.

Off-screen Mr. Sutherland and Fonda became lovers for nearly two years, during which time they emerged as two of Hollywood’s busiest actors and most outspoken politically on the left. Mr. Sutherland said he turned down leading roles in “Deliverance” and “Straw Dogs” — both sizable hits — because of their violence, and instead appeared in the documentary “F.T.A.” (1972), which followed him and Fonda as they perform in a roving antiwar Uso-type show on college campuses and near military installations.

“I thought I was going to be part of a revolution that was going to change movies and its influence on people,” he later told the Los Angeles Times.

Roeg, especially, leaned into Mr. Sutherland’s enigmatic screen persona in the psychological chiller “Don’t Look Now” (1973). Mr. Sutherland, playing an English art historian, and Christie were a couple who have disturbing visions of their young drowned daughter in a red raincoat.

With its mixture of dread and intimacy, the film also featured a love scene so explicit that the stars spent decades denying rumors that the sex was not simulated. Mr. Sutherland patiently explained that the takes were, at most, 15 seconds long, with a cameraman and director practically in bed with them.

On his winding path through the art-house and mainstream, Mr. Sutherland played a director dazed and confused by his first success in Mazursky’s Hollywood satire “Alex in Wonderland” (1970); an Italian fascist and pedophile who uses his head to bludgeon a kitten in Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic “1900” (1976); and a pothead professor in the raucous campus comedy “Animal House.” He also made a cameo — as a ridiculously clumsy waiter — in the parody pastiche “The Kentucky Fried Movie” (1977).

He played a health inspector in the acclaimed 1978 remake of the horror film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and filled his résumé with lively action fare (and a range of accents) such as “The Eagle Has Landed” (1976), as an Irish nationalist involved in a Nazi plot to kidnap Winston Churchill, and “The Great Train Robbery” (1979), as a Victorian-era locksmith and pickpocket opposite Connery’s gentleman thief.

In an attempt to showcase a more personable side, Mr. Sutherland portrayed one of his childhood idols, the idealistic, left-wing battlefield surgeon Norman Bethune, in a 1977 Canadian Broadcasting Corp. TV film. A Variety reviewer praised Mr. Sutherland’s “stunning performance” of a driven and complicated man.

Mr. Sutherland gained 25 pounds for the role of the patriarch in “Ordinary People” (1980), about an upper-middle-class Midwestern family that fractures after the accidental drowning death of a son. Mary Tyler Moore played the mother who hides her heartbreak behind a frosty exterior, and Timothy Hutton was the tormented surviving child.

For one memorable scene, Mr. Sutherland must tell his wife he is unsure if he loves her anymore. It was initially shot with him weeping, and the actor spent months trying to get director Robert Redford to reconsider. Mr. Sutherland ultimately prevailed. “He should just be sitting there,” he explained years later to the BBC. “He’s out of tears. He’s sitting in the salt-wet residue of whatever his mourning for his lost self was.”

The movie won four Oscars, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor (Hutton). Even the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, a critic whom Mr. Sutherland had made an enemy after once calling her a “jolly little lady,” praised his “graceful” characterization.

To his admirers, it was shocking Mr. Sutherland was so long neglected for as much as a nomination for any role in his vast portfolio. In 2017, at age 82, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

“I never expected to be nominated — ever,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “The reality was working and doing the work as well as you could and avoiding reading reviews and getting to the heart of the truth of something with the director. And if the director was pleased and we had that connection, then that was wonderful.”

Laughs, applause and luck

Donald Mcnichol Sutherland was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, on July 17, 1935, and grew up in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, a town of 5,000. His mother was a mathematics teacher, and his emotionally distant and often-absent father was a salesman.

He described a sickly and lonely childhood, including a case of rheumatic fever that left him at home his entire fourth-grade year. Classmates nicknamed him Dumbo because of his large ears. He preferred solitary activities that included puppet-making.

His father pushed him to focus on a practical trade, and Mr. Sutherland studied engineering at the University of Toronto before switching his major to English. He also gravitated to theater — getting laughs and applause for his small debut role in James Thurber’s “The Male Animal,” for which he had auditioned on a dare. “I have never, ever had it so good,” he later reminisced.

After graduating in 1958, he attended the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in London, served an apprenticeship in repertory theater and appeared on British TV shows such as “The Avengers.” His first movie credit, “The Castle of the Living Dead” (1964), was such a low-budget affair, he recalled, that one scene had him fighting with himself in the dual roles of witch and soldier.

Drooling idiot roles followed in other horror offerings before he went to Hollywood in 1967 and won the role of a country simpleton in “The Dirty Dozen,” about 12 military convicts recruited for an anti-nazi commando mission.

A day before shooting, TV western star Clint Walker told director Robert Aldrich it would be undignified for his character — a Native American — to play a comic scene where he must pretend to be a general.

“' You with the big ears, you do it,' ” Mr. Sutherland remembered Aldrich saying to him, the leastknown member of a cast that included Lee Marvin, Telly Savalas and Jim Brown. “I don’t think he knew my name. … It changed my life.” His performance in “The Dirty Dozen” helped persuade Altman to pluck him from relative obscurity for “M.A.S.H.”

Mr. Sutherland’s prolific career was studded with bombs, including the crime comedy “Steelyard Blues” (1973) with Fonda and the Depression-set Hollywood melodrama “The Day of the Locust” (1975), in which he played a sexually repressed accountant who meets a horrific end. But perhaps there was no fiasco more high profile than when the renowned Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini hired Mr. Sutherland to play the title role in “Casanova” (1976) and provided him with a conspicuously false nose and chin, and had him make love to a mechanized doll.

In casting a 6-foot-4, blond Canadian as a legendary 18th-century Italian lover, Fellini defended his choice of the leading man on the grounds that Casanova’s reputation was wrapped in myth, and Mr. Sutherland was “completely alien to the conventional idea of Casanova: magnetic, raven locks, dark skin.”

His reputation was not enhanced by his 1981 starring role in a Broadway adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Lolita,” with Mr. Sutherland playing the pedophile Humbert Humbert. The production lasted 12 performances, with New York Times theater critic Frank Rich’s scathing assessment that it was “the kind of embarrassment that audiences do not quickly forget or forgive.”

Mr. Sutherland became ubiquitous on-screen over the next decades, whether portraying a ruthless German spy in the World War II thriller “Eye of the Needle”; Paul Gauguin in the Danish-french production “The Wolf at the Door” (1986); a South African schoolteacher coming to grips with apartheid in “A Dry White Season” (1990); a mysterious colonel in Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-driven “JFK”; a pyromaniac in “Backdraft”; or as a liberal elitist Manhattan art dealer in “Six Degrees of Separation” (1993).

With his increasingly snowy mane, Mr. Sutherland became literally a kind of eminence grise: as a mentor to Kristy Swanson’s teenage bloodsucker in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992); to Matthew Mcconaughey’s swaggering younger lawyer in “A Time to Kill” (1996); to Billy Crudup’s champion runner Steve Prefontaine in “Without Limits” (1998); and to Mark Wahlberg’s thief in “The Italian Job” (2003). He also played one of director Clint Eastwood’s aging “Space Cowboys” (2000) and was the Bennet family patriarch in the 2005 screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice.”

Of his dozens of later screen roles, the most visible was the despotic and glowering President Coriolanus Snow in “The Hunger Games” franchise, starting in 2014. He saw the films, set in a post-apocalyptic future and based on a best-selling book series, as a chance to stir up its young target audience to “take action” against enduring injustices and inequalities. To his regret, he said, the role mostly led to young fans cornering him in public places and asking him to “look mean” in their selfies.

Among his network and cable TV parts, Mr. Sutherland won an Emmy Award for his supporting performance as a Russian bureaucrat overseeing the investigation of a serial killer in HBO’S “Citizen X” (1993).

Mr. Sutherland’s first marriage, to actress Lois Hardwick, ended in divorce in 1966, as did his second marriage, to left-wing activist Shirley Douglas, who in 1969 was arrested in Los Angeles by the FBI for raising money to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers. The charges were later dropped.

In the early 1970s, after his affair with Fonda ended, Mr. Sutherland began a long-term relationship with Francine Racette, a French Canadian actress. They eventually wed and divided their time between France, the United States and a farm property in Canada.

In addition to his wife, survivors include twins from his second marriage, movie and TV star Kiefer Sutherland and Rachel Sutherland; three children from his third marriage, Roeg, Rossif and Angus Sutherland; and four grandchildren.

In interviews, Mr. Sutherland said he found it emotionally excruciating to look at himself on-screen. “You put your body, your self, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces,” he said, noting that the director or producer will have final creative say.

For all the frustration, he said, he found boundless satisfaction in exploring new characters well into old age. There were an abundance of roles for a man in his 80s, he joked, mostly involving him walking on camera, saying a few lines of elder wisdom, clutching his chest and collapsing dead.

To the Associated Press, he mused that some director, in some serendipitous moment of truth, might be lucky enough to capture him not pretending.

“I’m really hoping that in some movie I’m doing, I die but I die, me, Donald, and they’re able to use my funeral and the coffin,” Mr. Sutherland said. “That would be absolutely ideal. I would love that.”