Scotsman Obituaries: Donald Sutherland, charismatic Canadian leading man equally adept at comedy and drama

When Donald Sutherland, a Canadian with Scottish ancestry, started off in British TV shows, playing thugs in the likes of The Saint and The Avengers in the 1960s, it hardly seemed likely he would go on to become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars a decade later.

Nor would it have seemed particularly likely that he would become a counter-cultural figurehead, given his first three Hollywood hits were war films. But then, M*A*S*H was hardly a traditional tale of battlefront heroics and in Kelly’s Heroes he was a hippy tank commander who teams up with Clint Eastwood in search of gold bars, not gold medals.

His Kelly’s Heroes character was called Oddball and that rather summed up Sutherland’s laid-back, slightly goofy big-screen image around that time. So it was another twist in the tale when the lanky, long-faced actor became a sex symbol after a bedroom scene in the 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now that was so realistic it was rumoured he and Julie Christie actually did have sex on screen.

Donald Sutherland accepts the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2018 Zurich Film Festival (Picture: Thomas Lohnes/Getty Images)

Sutherland could be very funny. He could be intense and frightening – the final scream from Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the stuff of nightmares, when the audience realises he is now “one of them”. He could be heartbreaking – watch his tearful eulogy for real-life distance runner Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits. And he could be villainous, as his turn in the Hunger Games movies showed, taking him to a whole new generation.

The son of a salesman, Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in St John, New Brunswick, in 1935. He grew up largely in Nova Scotia and in his teens worked as a reporter and disc jockey for a local radio station. At Toronto University he opted for the unusual combination of Engineering and Drama.

Intent on becoming an actor, he followed the example of many Canadian actors of the time and headed for England. It was easier for people from Canada, as part of the Commonwealth, to come and work here than it was for Americans. Canadian actors were regularly cast as Americans in British TV on the basis that audiences would not know the difference.

He enrolled at Lamda, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but dropped out after a year. In 1959 he married Lois Hardwick, an actress whom he had met in Canada, and they spent more than a year with Perth Repertory Theatre. Back in London in the mid-1960s he was in several episodes of The Saint, The Avengers and Man in a Suitcase.

Sutherland in Seventies spy drama Klute (Picture: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)

Sutherland’s first major film break was The Dirty Dozen as part of a team of psychopathic military prisoners given the chance to redeem themselves on a dangerous operation behind enemy lines. Lee Marvin played the officer in charge, while the prisoners themselves were very much divided into a group of stars, including Charles Bronson and Telly Savalas, and – as Sutherland put it – “the bottom six”, who were there to make up the numbers.

The characters were American, but the film shot in England and actors were hired locally for the smaller roles. Originally Sutherland’s character had hardly any dialogue, but Clint Walker – who was one of the top six – did not want to do a scene where he impersonated a German soldier.

Sutherland later recalled: “The director Robert Aldrich, who had a huge authoritarian streak, turned to me – we’d all had our heads shaved – and said, ‘You! With the big ears! You do it!’ He didn’t even know my name!” It gave Sutherland the chance to employ various physical tics.

On the strength of The Dirty Dozen, producer Ingo Preminger cast him as army surgeon “Hawkeye” Pierce in the anarchic military comedy M*A*S*H and resisted attempts by director Robert Altman to replace him. No Audie Murphy or John Wayne, Sutherland’s laid-back demeanour was complemented by a warm chuckle and distinctive little whistle, spectacles and what looked like an angler’s hat. The acting was naturalistic, with Altman pioneering his famous “overlapping dialogue”. The structure was episodic, the tone anti-authoritarian and the shoot reportedly chaotic.

Nevertheless M*A*S*H was one of the biggest hits of 1970. In both M*A*S*H and Kelly’s Heroes, Sutherland presented a vision of detached cool while the craziness of war rages around him.

In the mid-1960s Sutherland divorced his first wife and married Shirley Douglas, another Canadian actress. Their twins Rachel and Kiefer Sutherland, star of 24, were born in London in 1966, just before his career began to take off.

Douglas was arrested while supposedly attempting to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers from an undercover FBI agent. Idealistic and extremely naive, she apparently tried to pay for them with a personal cheque. She was never charged, though Sutherland later talked about the incident in the press.

That marriage also ended in divorce and Sutherland began a relationship with Jane Fonda, his co-star in the thriller Klute, and together they vigorously campaigned against American involvement in the Vietnam War.

While making the Canadian western Alien Thunder he met actress Francine Racette, who became his third wife and with whom he had three more children.

Sutherland made several films in Europe, playing the title role in Federico Fellini’s Casanova and a child-rapist and fascist killer in Bernardo Bertolucci’s period epic 1900.

Back in the US, he was impressive as the man who realises the awful truth in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, he was a college professor in the anarchic comedy Animal House and the father in Robert Redford’s earnest, Oscar-winning family drama Ordinary People.

By the end of the 1970s his brief period as a leading man was virtually over. His career picked up again in the 1990s, and later films include JFK, Space Cowboys, Outbreak, the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill – in which his son Kiefer also appeared – the 2003 remake of The Italian Job and, of course, the Hunger Games films, in which he played the sinister President Snow.

He is survived by his third wife and five children.

Obituaries

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