THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) Francis Lawrence
Yesterday, Kiefer Sutherland came to social media with a devastating announcement. His father, who he rightfully described as "one of the most important actors in the history of film," had passed away. Donald Sutherland was 88, and he leaves behind an enviable legacy. His career is the stuff of legend, spanning nearly two hundred screen credits over six decades and many a landmark in American cinema. Moreover, his kindness and political activism earned him admiration as a human being, not just an artist.
Speaking only for myself, Donald Sutherland was one of my favorite thespians of the silver screen, a man of varied talents who could as effortlessly embody fatherly warmth as the darkest impulses within us all. His absence is inconceivable, yet one must contend with it. And what better way to do it than to celebrate his well-lived life? Let's start at the beginning…
THE CASTLE OF THE LIVING DEAD (1964) Luciano Ricci & Warren Kiefer
Born on July 17th, 1935, in New Brunswick, Canada, Donald McNichol Sutherland was the son of a salesman and business owner. His childhood wasn't easy, with the boy suffering from a litany of maladies as the family moved from Lakeside farmland to a town in Nova Scotia where he spent his adolescence. There, the young man became interested in the world of media and the arts, nabbing his first job as a correspondent for a local radio station at the tender age of fourteen. Paternal influence prevailed alongside new ambitions, so Sutherland majored in both engineering and drama at Victoria University. By 1957, however, he had decided to pursue acting full-time, abandoning whatever career he might've had as an engineer to work in the Ontario theater scene.
Deemed unattractive by those closest to him, including his mother, and prone to slumping so his tall frame wouldn't loom over others, Sutherland didn't see himself as the matinée idol type. Still, he set sail across the Atlantic to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where he found his big start as a character actor. During the early 60s, dividing his time between school and stage, Sutherland found himself in a myriad of West End productions and even some TV appearances. Sometimes, these two worlds juxtaposed, like when he played Fortinbras in a small screen staging of Hamlet. Still, more often than not, respectable theater work contrasted with sudsy genre efforts for the camera.
Indeed, Sutherland's first feature film credit includes him in the fad for Gothic horror in postwar British cinema. In Warren Kiefer and Luciano Ricci's The Castle of the Living Dead, he stretched his character actor predispositions, playing three supporting roles in broad strokes. He's both an old man and young Sgt. Paul, whose terrified stares mark the picture's end. But that's not all, for the directors also saw fit to put the young thespian in crone drag, playing a figure known as The Witch. In one of the picture's most amusing passages, Sutherland shares a dialogue with himself as the image intercuts between the hag and the military man. One wonders if his foray into horror was born out of necessity rather than any particular interest.
DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965) Freddie Francis
After all, when reminiscing about his first movie auditions, Sutherland recounts how he was told they wanted a guy next door and that he didn't look like he'd "ever lived next door to anybody." It's like his mother's judgment was a curse. But it was also a blessing because, as she said, his face had character. Not to mention that, with his piercing blue eyes, Sutherland was made for closeups, whether his gaze was to project threat or wonderment, be shining with tears or burning with anger, mayhap desire. If you need proof, look at his subsequent horror movies. Though he portrayed a simple-minded lunatic in Die! Die! My Darling, he's a tragic romantic figure in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors and equally plausible.
Going through articles and interviews, it's bittersweet to recognize Sutherland's insecurities about his looks and how often they intrude upon his professional history. For me, he was always striking, if not besotting, so these depreciative comments come as a disappointing surprise. And they are constant. Take The Dirty Dozen, for example. He got the part of Vernon Pinkley after the film's producers watched his guest appearance on The Avengers TV show. However, it wasn't a substantial character until one day in the shoot when another actor refused to play a scene as written. Director Robert Aldrich said "You with the big ears, you do it," and Sutherland stepped up.
MASH (1970) Robert Altman
The war picture was a tremendous success, leading the Canadian scene-stealer to consider a career in Hollywood. With the financial help of Christopher Plummer, he moved his family to the US, and quickly started working on an onslaught of projects that would introduce him to a new audience, maybe even make him an unlikely star. Since he had proven himself as stellar comic relief in a gritty war picture, it's not shocking to know he was roped into MASH even before Robert Altman and Elliott Gould were on board. And even though the director tried to fire him mid-shoot (which Altman has disputed), producer Ingo Preminger was right when he chose Sutherland. As Hawkeye Pierce, he aces the picture's blend of satire and gravitas, its ensemble chaos married to some strange order, its irreverence and biting observations.
At this point, Sutherland's Hollywood journey became a tale of two types. On the one hand, he was a go-to choice for edgy comedies wishing to distance themselves from antiquated Old Hollywood traditions. See him share the screen with Gene Wilder in Start the Revolution Without Me or his star turn in Paul Mazursky's solipsistic Alex in Wonderland. There's even the cultural curio of Little Murders, where Sutherland shows up for one sequence, playing an oddball reverend who marries a couple while monologuing on existentialism and a stubborn rejection of the divine. On the other hand, there are the reoccurring war stories like Kelly's Heroes and Johnny Got His Gun.
KLUTE (1971) Alan J. Pakula
The latter film, directed by Dalton Trumbo, aligned with Sutherland's political views, exemplifying anti-war sentiment through a nightmarish narrative. Later, when he got involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and put on the traveling revue FTA (Free the Army or, more vulgarly, Fuck the Army), Sutherland would recite passages from that film as part of his act. However, it took his involvement with Alan J. Pakula's paranoia classic, Klute, to ignite his most ardent activism. Negotiating self-effacement and noir-ish eros, the actor delivers a formidable performance alongside a never-better Jane Fonda. Their chemistry was more than smoke and mirrors, as they had an affair behind the scenes.
It lasted for a couple of years, with each star exulting the other's social outrage, fueling their fury into political work. Their efforts are immortalized in the FTA documentary Sutherland himself produced, giving modern audiences a glimpse into a time when Hollywood stars weren't afraid of making powerful enemies to stand up for what was right. In fact, these antics led the FBI to put Sutherland under surveillance, as revealed in 2017 when a slew of confidential documents were declassified. Yet, in 1976, the Canadian entertainer got a juicy role because he was the least radical of the two options. When Richard Harris was discovered to have been at an IRA fundraiser, Sutherland got his job in The Eagle Has Landed.
DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) Nicolas Roeg
But before that bit of British war moviedom, Sutherland returned to his horror origins. It was 1973, and Nicolas Roeg was one of the most exciting filmmakers around, having worked as a cinematographer before taking on director duties. His Don't Look Now is a 70s classic, dipped in the bright red of traumatic memories and dripping with grief. It was to be one of Sutherland's first forays into cinematic fatherhood, though twisted into a Venetian hallucination. But there's more to it, still. Along with Julie Christie, the actor stars in one of the most famous sex scenes of all time, fragmented yet so intimate that rumors live on that it was unsimulated.
For what it's worth, Donald Sutherland has denied such claims. Despite his boldness on-screen, the actor was quite shy, feeling awkward in his shared nakedness with Christie. Whatever the truth may be, the scene's power is undeniable. It's a stab of forbidden closeness, something that should be secret but is exposed, vulnerable and fragile. A few years later, Sutherland would star in another horror classic, remaking Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the image of new American anxieties. If the instant of loss reverberates through Don't Look Now, this later film is best remembered for an inhuman cry. Depersonalized and accusing, the actor has seldom been scarier than in the picture's final scene.
THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1975) John Schlesinger
And that's saying something because, no matter how much his Hollywood career was founded on comedy, Sutherland is a veritable scream king. The project needn't even be horror for him to unleash his wild side, to peruse the darkest corners of the soul and show them to us in all their ignobility. That's how I would describe the pathetic entity that is Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust, a tale of Old Hollywood hedonism turned cannibalistic, self-destructive, an apocalypse of animal flesh untethered from reason or decency. Donald Sutherland surrenders to John Schlesinger's madness as he was prone to do with visionary cineastes.
It was our beloved Canadian freak who said: "When you're working for a good director, you become subjective and submissive. You become his concubine. All that you're seeking is his pleasure." Even Nicole Kidman would blush in the face of such shameless auteur lust. Maybe that's what Federico Fellini saw in him when describing the actor as having the eyes of a masturbator. That quality earned him a starring role in the Italian master's tale of Casanova, a feverish feast for the senses that demands its star's conviction. In Sutherland's hands, the eighteenth-century serial seducer is both alien and awfully human, a bestial thing whose behavior disturbs because it feels grounded in familiar wants.
FELLINI'S CASANOVA (1976) Federico Fellini
As much as one might praise other New Hollywood stars for their adventurousness, such projects make Donald Sutherland stand out from the pack. He's so much more daring, so open to new experiences that his colleagues look provincial by comparison. Sure, Robert De Niro followed Sutherland into the madness of Bernardo Bertolluci's Novecento. However, the Oscar winner doesn't challenge our perception of him nearly as much as Sutherland does. At the end of the day, we can still recognize a commercial star in De Niro. His colleague is beyond that, so devoted to the portrayal of a fascist psychopath that he makes you recoil. Even Sutherland had trouble watching the flick, terrified by what he had brought to the screen.
These two Italian projects are just a couple of examples of various departures from the Hollywood mainstream when Sutherland was at the height of his popularity. One can't begrudge his decision to pursue these risky businesses, but that's also why his stardom started to dim as far as the American public was concerned. Financially, he struggled despite an uncommon level of productivity that followed him from the start of his career to the end. Then again, some of it was a lack of foresight rather than a capitulation to artistic integrity above all. Consider his John Landis collaborations, with particular emphasis on the Bohemian professor of 1978's Animal House.
Unaware of how big the comedy would become, Sutherland preferred a modest paycheck instead of a share of the film's future profits. In retrospect, he speculated the decision might have cost him up to fourteen million. That could be why, as the 80s dawned and gave way to the 90s, the actor balanced his movie endeavors with more TV work, where he found both acclaim and popularity. Still, it wouldn't be accurate to characterize this new decade as one of creative compromise. After all, it started with one of Sutherland's greatest achievements, another grieving father haunted by a child's loss and the dereliction of his marriage. He is simply mesmerizing in Robert Redford's Best Picture-winning Ordinary People.
ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980) Robert Redford
Other actors would have settled into the comfort of prestige, but Sutherland wasn't content, chasing weird peccadilloes, returning to horror and more genre fare. And that's not all. In 1985, he was convinced by Roeg – who he named one of his children after – to meet Kate Bush and the two hit it off as only great artists can. He starred in her Cloudbusting music video, adding another medium to a vast resume. By 1989 he was also making a resurgence in political-minded cinema. Euzhan Palcy's A Dry White Season was his way of contributing to the dismantlement of the Apartheid regime in South Africa. In it, he plays an apologist who gradually turns into a dissident, yet, despite his arc, the man is never framed as a hero.
This is not white saviorism, but something more complicated, so much thornier and difficult to swallow or dismiss. It's one of Donald Sutherland's best films, and Palcy was among the many colleagues who went on record to express their grief over the actor's passing. Everyone he worked with, from the biggest star to the most anonymous crew member, seems to have a nice story or anecdote to share, some memory of his generosity. It's a quality that shines behind and in front of the camera, for there's rarely been a performer more adept at bringing the best out of his costars and taking his projects seriously, be they arthouse experiments or shlock. Hell, I'd classify his supporting work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Oscar-worthy - that's how good he was.
JFK (1991) Oliver Stone
How else could he have become the king of the cameo as the 20th century drew to a close? His turn as X in Oliver Stone's JFK has to be the most entertaining info-dump in movie history, perfectly modulated and delivered so that we're drawn into the conspiracy by the man's Mephistophelean tongue. We feel the pleasure in the showboating, yet his sharpness is like citrus over a fatty treat. He cuts through it. There's similar magic happening in Backdraft, where Sutherland serves Hannibal Lecter realness with a pyromaniac twist, and the dead patriarchs of The Italian Job and Cold Mountain. The smallest part can become a monument.
As the years advanced, these supporting turns took over much of Sutherland's filmography, making his rare leading role into something to be treasured, a rarity of immense value. Such is the case of Six Degrees of Separation, where the actor is asked to excavate the ruins of a marriage buried beneath patrician pleasures and shallow anecdotes. If Stockard Channing breathes fire into the film's dramatic engine, Sutherland is the oil keeping the mechanism running smoothly. Without his reactions, his grandiloquent moments, not-so-secret shame, and insinuations of emptiness, her character study would feel much less cogent. So even when playing lead, Sutherland supported his costars, a generous performer in all ways that mattered.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1993) Fred Schepisi
I guess that is one of the reasons why he never achieved the recognition one feels he deserved. Famously, Donald Sutherland was forever ignored by the Academy, receiving no competitive Oscar nomination from them. No, not even for MASH or Ordinary People, or any of the characters that would have defined other performers' careers but are just one among Sutherland's many triumphs. He came close in the late '90s with works like A Time to Kill and Without Limits, but precursor support never translated into that final validation from the industry. At least the Television Academy gave him some gold.
Though under-discussed today, the TV movie Citizen X is among the actor's most excellent turns, and he won an Emmy for it. He plays a high-ranking Soviet official who serves as the liaison between the on-the-ground investigators of a serial killer case and the higher-ups. It's a silky smooth, perchance serpentine portrayal of politicking that maintains a level of moral ambiguity to the very end. Against archetypes and flattening simplicities, Sutherland finds a fully-fleshed character in the true crime drama. He's so good that one can excuse why the industry went crazy, casting the actor in every available role of a silver-haired politician and military man, authoritarianism as far as the eye could see.
Sutherland was brilliant at it, never resting on his laurels even when the roles were beneath him or so repetitive they might as well be echoes of past performances. He found ways of making each of them unique, be it through wit or venom, through a surge of unexpected good humor, or the kiss of cold steel. Consider his turn as Clark Clifford in HBO's Path of War - another acclaimed bit of prestige TV. Or even the manipulator Nathan Templeton against Geena Davis' Commander in Chief. But just as his many supporting turns made lead parts feel like events, so did this lean toward powerful patriarchs. Whenever he got to show his softer side, Sutherland made it count like few others could.
PRIDE & PREJUDICE (2005) Joe Wright
I have previously written about many of Donald Sutherland's works. There was an Almost There piece on his Ordinary People snub, a Palcy retrospective that touched on A Dry White Season, and a list of essential works from the famed actor. In that last one, I already detailed my love for his Mr. Bennett in Pride & Prejudice but I need to reiterate it here. Laconic, self-amused with a glimmer of irony in the corner of his eye, Sutherland presents this Austen character as he was never before seen. There's such warmth in his portrayal that watching him is like feeling a loved one's embrace. It's the security of being cherished and the pleasure of basking in the summer sun.
In a just world, Donald Sutherland would have been an Oscar winner by the time Joe Wright's literary adaptation rolled around in 2005. However, as he wasn't, wouldn't this have been the perfect opportunity to reward him? Many lesser thespians have received career honors for work that pales in comparison to Sutherland. His last scene with Keira Knightley alone belongs in the canon of big-screen fatherhood, and any clip reel honoring this Canadian star would be incomplete without it. Pardon the outrage over his lack of nomination. We're all aware Oscars aren't everything, yet their refusal to recognize this titan irks, now more than ever.
AMPAS may have realized this because, in 2017, Donald Sutherland received an Honorary Award. One would imagine this was partly due to a renewed blockbuster popularity thanks to his work as Cornelius Snow, the autocratic villain of the Hunger Games movies. It was a role the actor actively campaigned for, going so far as writing a letter to the filmmakers. Like in many other instances, he was motivated by political righteousness, wanting to reach out to the younger generations and "wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the '70s." I can only hope that viewers who found Sutherland through those movies looked beyond them and saw all else that his filmography has to offer.
Donald Sutherland worked to the end and is survived by Francine Racette, his partner since 1972. There are also five children – Kiefer, Rossif, Angus, Roeg, and Rachel Sutherland – and grandchildren, too. He died in Miami, surrounded by loved ones, and admired by many more.
As a final note, I'd like to remember a story the actor shared in multiple interviews over the years. It was 1968, in the territory formerly known as Yugoslavia, when Sutherland succumbed to spinal meningitis during the shoot of Kelly's Heroes. In that terrible occasion, Donald Sutherland died. It was merely for a few seconds, but still. According to the actor "you watch your body go down this blue tunnel. It's iridescent, like an oyster shell. It's very seductive, dying." Back then, he pulled himself back. But not this time. I can only hope, he was at peace when returning to that blue passage into the beyond. More than that, I hope he knew how much he was loved, how many lives he touched, and how he'll never be forgotten.
Cinema - the entire world, really - is poorer without the late great Donald Sutherland.