Donald Sutherland was cinema’s Canadian chameleon (2024)

Canadian-born Donald Sutherland, for more than 50 years one of Hollywood’s most versatile actors, has died, his son Kiefer Sutherland posted today on X. He was 88.

For younger moviegoers, Mr. Sutherland is likely known for two achievements – being the father of Kiefer Sutherland, star of the hugely popular, long-running (2001-2010) television series 24 and, beginning in 2012, playing the nefarious President Snow in The Hunger Games movie franchise.

For baby boomers, however, Mr. Sutherland will be remembered for the indelible performances he delivered in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s for directors as varied and esteemed as Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Schlesinger, Robert Redford and Federico Fellini.

Amazingly, Mr. Sutherland never received an Academy Award nomination in a career encompassing more than 140 feature films, but he did receive an honorary Oscar in 2017. A list of some of his roles and the movies in which he appeared is sufficient, certainly among fans, to conjure his talent, range and charisma. They include the rascally Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970), the anguished detective in Klute (1971) and the doomed architectural restorer in Don’t Look Now (1973), the last especially memorable for the passionate lovemaking scene between the actor and co-star Julie Christie. Also noteworthy: his Attila the demented fascist in 1900 (1975), the caddish, dope-smoking professor in 1978’s National Lampoon’s Animal House, Calvin Jarrett, the grieving father of Ordinary People (1980), the ruthless German agent in Eye of the Needle (1981) and Flan Kittredge, the snobbish New York art dealer from Six Degrees of Separation (1993).

Six feet, four inches in height with piercing blue eyes, a rumbly voice, a winning smile that could go from devilish to impish to bashful, and a face his mother once described as more “interesting” than handsome, Mr. Sutherland was a distinctive, often commanding presence. As Maclean’s observed in 2000, “He cannot walk down the street without being recognized, here in Canada and most of the rest of the world.” Yet this distinctiveness, on film at least, was chameleonic, allowing him to play handsome (Don’t Look Now) and disturbed (The Day of the Locust, 1975), leads (Fellini Casanova, 1976) and cameos (Oliver Stone’s JFK, 1991).

“I love the characters I play,” he told an interviewer in 2008, “and I try to learn more about the human condition when I play them. No matter who they are, I always try to inform them and give them as much of my own observations and truth and morality and immorality and poetry as I can.”

Mr. Sutherland’s Canadian connections were many and abiding. Although he lived mostly in France, California (eventually forsaken “because I couldn’t stand it there”) and Florida, he kept both his Canadian citizenship and a home in Georgeville in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. All three of his wives, with whom he had a total of five children, were Canadian. Shirley Douglas, one of the two daughters of CCF/NDP stalwart Tommy Douglas, was Mr. Sutherland’s second wife (1966-1970) and, in 1966, the mother of Kiefer and twin sister Rachel.

Mr. Sutherland was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 1978 and in 2000 received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto. In 2009, CTV hired him as the voice of its promotional commercials for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Later, Mr. Sutherland helped carry the Olympic flag into BC Place during the opening ceremony. The actor also starred in several Canadian productions, most notably playing Dr. Norman Bethune in the 1977 CBC-TV drama of the same name and again in 1990 in Philip Borsos’s Bethune: The Making of a Hero. In the early 1970s, he met Francine Racette, the woman who would become his third wife, on the set of Alien Thunder in which Mr. Sutherland played a Mountie. The couple would go on to have three sons – Roeg, Rossif and Angus Redford, each named after a director Mr. Sutherland had worked with. In 1983 his performance in Threshold as a cardiac surgeon determined to implant the first self-sustaining artificial human heart won him a best-actor Genie.

He was born Donald McNichol Sutherland in Saint John, N.B., on July 17, 1935, the son of a salesman and a mathematics teacher, and spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Bridgewater, N.S. He was reportedly a sickly child, battling polio and rheumatic fever. As a teen, he worked part-time in a radio station. Early on, he thought he might like to be a sculptor. But by age 11, as he told Charlie Rose in a 1998 interview, “I wanted to be an actor” – a calling sparked, he recalled later, by seeing David Lean’s film adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. His father, however, urged him to “have something to fall back on,” and in the early 1950s he enrolled as an engineering student at the University of Toronto.

While there, Mr. Sutherland acted in student productions at Hart House and before long quit engineering to major in English. A positive review of his performance as Stephano in Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Globe and Mail critic Herbert Whittaker (“a spark of talent illumines the stage”) convinced Mr. Sutherland to try his hand at professional acting. He travelled to London to attend the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. It was not a happy experience – the school’s legendary voice instructor, Iris Warren, “said I should drive a truck,” he told Mr. Rose – and he left after a year. Before long, however, he was scoring parts on stage and in television and film in the U.K.

Mr. Sutherland’s first foray into Hollywood movies occurred in 1965 when Columbia Pictures decided to shoot its Cold War thriller The Bedford Incident at Shepperton Studios, London. Cast as a sailor, Mr. Sutherland spent most of the movie, which starred Richard Widmark, in the sick bay of the destroyer U.S.S. Bedford. Still, he had his foot in the hatch. A year later, he was cast as Vernon Pinkley, one of the dirty dozen in Robert Aldrich’s acclaimed Second-World-War drama of the same name. Again, it was a small part (“I was one of the bottom six,” he told an interviewer) and hardly edifying – Mr. Sutherland was a dopey, gaunt-looking psychopath sentenced to 30 years in prison – but he made the most of it. Fame was clinched in 1970 with his star turn in Altman’s M*A*S*H. Playing a surgeon in a mobile medical unit during the Korean War, Mr. Sutherland, as one critic observed, wowed audiences with his “nonchalant disregard for authority and a moral outrage that articulated the disillusionment of the anti-Vietnam War movement.”

It wasn’t entirely an act. In 1971, along with then-lover Jane Fonda (he’d starred opposite her in Klute, for which she won an Oscar), Mr. Sutherland joined the Free Theater Associates on a tour of coffee houses near U.S. Army bases. One of his jobs in this anti-war cabaret was to read from Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s famous 1939 novel about a First-World-War soldier who discovers he has lost his arms, legs and face but whose brain remains fully functioning. (Mr. Sutherland went on to do a cameo as Christ for the film adaptation.)

Thirty-four years later, while appearing as the Speaker of the House in the NBC-TV political drama series Commander-in-Chief, a BBC interviewer asked Mr. Sutherland for his views on George W. Bush’s Republican administration. “They were inept,” Mr. Sutherland replied, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “They were inadequate to the task and they lied.” As for Iraq, “They do not care about Iraqi people,” Mr. Sutherland opined. “They do not care about the families of dead soldiers. They only care about profit.”

Throughout his career, Mr. Sutherland never seemed to lack for work nor saw his interest in performing slacken. Often he would swerve into interesting nooks and crannies. In 2000, for instance, he chose to end an almost-20-year hiatus from the stage by appearing at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre in a six-week run of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s Enigma Variations. The play was translated from the French by Mr. Sutherland’s then-26-year-old son, Roeg, and produced by his wife Francine. In 1985, he appeared as Kate Bush’s father, an eccentric, persecuted scientist loosely based on the real Wilhelm Reich, in the video of her hit song, Cloudbursting. A few years before this, he narrated the diaries of Dr. Ben Wheeler for a feature documentary, A War Story, directed by Dr. Wheeler’s then-Edmonton-based daughter, Anne.

One thing Donald Sutherland did not do was direct films. “I wouldn’t know how to direct,” he once told The Globe and Mail’s Michael Posner. “I don’t have that talent. I work from the inside out.”

His memoir, titled Made Up, But Still True, is scheduled for release later this year.

In photos: Donald Sutherland’s life in film

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article was published with an incorrect byline, which has been removed.