When Donald Sutherland was a young man, considering a career in the theater, he asked his mother if he was handsome. “No, but your face has a lot of character,” she replied. It was probably an understatement, she said. The telegraphThe Canadian actor, who has died aged 88, was one of “the most distinctive men ever to become a major Hollywood star”. At 6ft 4in, he had a dashing, lithe-limbed appearance, tousled hair, “large ears, a broad smile, prominent pale blue eyes and a hangdog expression”.
He was not a pin-up girl's idea of a character, and on screen he could be menacing or just vaguely unsettling. A producer once rejected him for a role, saying, “This part calls for a guy next door. You don't look like you've lived next door to anyone.” And yet, with a “mournful” baritone voice that was as “instantly recognizable as James Mason's,” Sutherland was also capable of exuding “a brooding sexual magnetism that many women found irresistible.”
Admired for his acting and the subtlety of his performances, he appeared in more than 100 films. Directors loved him for his ability to slip into a role and his willingness to accept direction. He wasn't always so malleable, he says. He thought that in Robert Altman's 1970 comedy-drama “M*A*S*H,” he had pushed too hard to play the irreverent Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in his own way. It was when he was cast in Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set horror “Don't Look Now” (1973) that he came to the conclusion that “acting in a film is about surrendering your will to the director.”
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After reading the script, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, he agreed to star in the film, but suggested Roeg give it a happier ending. ” Do you want to do it or not ? », demanded Roeg. “Because it’s the movie. Sutherland then delivered one of his “most memorable performances” as the grieving father of his drowned child – although it was somewhat overshadowed by speculation about his lengthy and unusual realistic sex scene with Julie Christie, his on-screen wife. Christie never outright denied that they had sex on camera, but Sutherland insisted they did not. A funny and caring man, he said the two had barely met when they had to walk naked on set. “We laid down on the bed and the director said, 'All right, Julie, pull your knees up to your shoulder. Donald takes your mouth and slides it along the inside of his left thigh.' It continued like this for 12 hours. None of us could speak afterward. »
Donald Sutherland was born in New Brunswick in 1935, to Frederick, a salesman, and Dorothy (née McNichol), a mathematics teacher. A sickly child, suffering from polio and rheumatic rheumatism, he grew up mainly in Nova Scotia. In high school, at age 14, he became the youngest radio host in Canada, even though his goal was to become a sculptor. He caught the acting bug while studying engineering and theater at the University of Toronto, and in 1957 he traveled to England to study at Lamda. After a year he abandoned his studies and, with his first wife, Lois Hardwick, joined a repertory theater in Perth.
In the early 1960s, he began landing roles on British television shows such as “The Saint,” and he also appeared in a West End play with Rex Harrison. His first film was Warren Kiefer's “Castle of the Living Dead” (1964). But his breakout role was as a dim-witted soldier in the 1967 war film “The Dirty Dozen,” said the Times, about a group of military prisoners released to take part in a perilous war mission. It featured several established stars, but Sutherland recalled that he was among the “bottom six”, there to make up the numbers, and that he had almost no lines until one of the other actors refuses to participate in a scene. At that point, director Robert Aldrich turned to him and said, “You with the big ears, you do it!” The film was a success and his Hollywood career began.
At first, Hollywood wasn't sure what to do with Sutherland, said The Washington Postand continued to cast him as comic “boneheads” in films such as Kelly's Heroes. But his role in the counterculture film “M*A*S*H,” set during the Korean War but with a Vietnam feel, established him as a star of the new decade. In 1970, he separated from his second wife, actress Shirley Douglas, with whom he had twins: Kiefer and Rachel. Soon after, he began an affair with Jane Fonda, his co-star in “Klute,” and together they toured the United States with an antiwar revue he had co-written.
In Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 film, “1900,” he plays a fascist who smashes a boy's brains out (“And I turned down 'Deliverance' and 'The Straw Dogs' because of the violence!”) , and he's the scientist who figures out what's going on in 1978's “Invasion of the Grave Snatchers.” Around the same time, he was offered a share of the profits in exchange for two days of filming on ” Animal House.” He instead accepted a flat fee of $35,000, which cost him about $20 million.
In 1980, he was quietly brilliant as the worried father in Robert Redford's hit drama “Ordinary People.” But while three other cast members were nominated for an Oscar, he was overlooked. After that, the phone “mysteriously stopped ringing.” Nevertheless, he continued to win roles and appeared – among others – as a German spy in “Eye of the Needle” and as a middle-class South African slowly turning against apartheid in “A Dry White Season “. In 1991, many thought he should have won an Oscar for his single scene in Oliver Stone's “JFK.” But again, he wasn't even nominated.
He continued to work into his 80s and made himself known to new generations of moviegoers by playing a warm and fatherly Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (2005) and President Snow in The Hunger Games. Snow is an evil character, but Sutherland was careful not to deny the character's humanity. He told the New York Observer: “Do you think Lyndon Johnson felt like he was the bad guy, destroying a million Vietnamese? George W. Bush or Dick Cheney – they don't see themselves as bad guys… Snow thinks it's timely. He's trying to control an empire. »
Along the way, he also starred in many failures, including Hugh Hudson's “Revolution,” and turned down a few successful films. As he explained, the actors can't judge much from the script. He was married for the last five decades of his life to French-Canadian actress Francine Racette, with whom he had three other sons, Roeg, Rossif and Angus (whose middle name is Redford). Like Kiefer, they were named in honor of movie directors. He finally received an honorary Oscar in 2017.
