Donald Sutherland, whose capacity to both elegance and upset, both reassure and repulse, was abundantly displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid- up battlefield surgeon in” M*A*S*H”, a brutal Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle”, a heartfelt father in” Common People” and a strutting fascist in” 1900″, has died. He was 88. His brother Kiefer Sutherland made the announcement, but he did not name the death.
With his much face, drooping eyes, protruding ears and catlike smile, the 6- foot- 4 Sutherland was always anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He frequently recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he again asked his mother if he was great- looking, only to be told,” No, but your experience has a lot of personality”. He described how a developer again turned down him for a movie role and said,” This part calls for a guy- following- door type. You do n’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone”. And yet, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 movies and TV shows, some of which included as many as 50. Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Oliver Stone were among his directors who appealed for his chameleon-like ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another, and just plain odd in another. ” For me, working with these great guys was like falling in love”, Sutherland said of those filmmakers. ” I was their lover, their beloved”.
Sutherland was first portrayed as one of the army misfits and sociopaths in” The Dirty Dozen,” which was set during World War II. His character did n’t have any lines until he was instructed to take over from an actor. You do it, “you with the big ears”! he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. ” He did n’t even know my name”.
Sutherland appeared in 34 movies, frequently playing men who walked a fine line between sanity and madness, and on occasion erased that line. Some of his more memorable roles fell in a stretch from 1970 to 1981, when he appeared in films. His fascist in Bertolucci’s” 1900″ ( 1976 ), his heavily made- up Lothario in” Fellini’s Casanova” ( 1976 ) and his murderous WWII spy in “Eye of the Needle” ( 1981 ) were examples of his capacity for the grotesque and the ominous.
But he could also be winningly irreverent, as in a pivotal early role: Hawkeye Pierce, an insolent mobile- hospital surgeon, in Robert Altman’s” M*A*S*H” ( 1970 ), set during the Korean War but with distinctly Vietnam- era sensibilities. He never received an Academy Award nomination despite the generally positive reviews he received. There were other honours, though, including a 1995 Emmy for his role as a Soviet investigator in” Citizen X”, an HBO film. Additionally, he received two Golden Globes for his portrayal of the president’s adviser Clark Clifford in HBO’s” Path to War” in 2002. Well- received performances included the kindly Mr. Bennet in” Pride &, Prejudice” ( 2005 ) the president in the dystopian” Hunger Games” series of the 2010s.
