R.I.P. Donald Sutherland

No, I’m not a month late in eulogizing Donald Sutherland (1935-2024). Today was the late actor’s birthday, the day on which I had already been scheduled to write about him. And it’s preferable in many cases to put some daylight between the appreciation and the passing, so the assessment can be a little more balanced. People have an understandable expectation that eulogies be 100% positive. So this is not a eulogy. But it’s still about 99% positive, because like most everyone else, I loved Donald Sutherland.

My life began at around the same time as Sutherland’s movie career. Thus I grew up watching his films, and am delighted to observe that I’ve seen quite an expansive and representative chunk of his nearly 200 screen credits across six decades, including some pretty obscure stuff from his early years. Hailing from Canada’s sleepy Maritime Provinces, Sutherland ended up becoming an international star, associated in particular with American, British, Canadian, and Italian films. A surprising number of them are modern classics. It’s why I chose the obviously uncharacteristic photo from the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to head this post. Is it not one of the most memorable moments in all of cinema? It was for this thirteen year old! I’m quite certain it’s the first Sutherland movie I saw in a cinema. It may also be the first movie in which I ever saw him period, although it’s just as possible I’d seen or or two of the earlier ones on television by that point.

With Sutherland’s professorial manner and obvious refinement, he was tailor made for the ’70s, when audiences liked their heroes smart, shaggy, and unconventional. Movie stardom has a way of redefining popular aesthetics. We’ve been accustomed to seeing Sutherland on screens for so long, it may have slipped from the collective memory how unusual he looked. His most striking feature was those fishy, staring eyes, not unlike the peepers of a mad man. He was also 6’4″ tall, although his movies tend to deemphasize that fact. In his early films he was often cast as mentally challenged characters or nuts, as in Die! Die! My Darling (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), Kelly’s Heroes (1970), and Little Murders (1971). He was well received in many of these roles, but they were a palpable stretch. He was more convincing as a guy who had all his marbles than as one who was missing a few. There was something insinuating in his grin that bespoke gears and sprockets beneath the mask, and his eyebrows had a sort of Satanic arch to them. He’d have been a great Iago. He even had dimples, not a bad attribute for a leading man. He achieved that status with Klute (1971) which introduced a sleek and stylish Sutherland that we never quite un-saw afterward. Unusual for a male star, he had that kind of beauty we think of as “Resting Bitch Face”. You would describe him as fine — not ruggedly handsome. Though he was in many war films, spy thrillers, and the like, he wasn’t what Hollywood conditions us to think of an American hero. In the ’70s, his peak as a star, he often sported a massive mop of hair and a fashionable moustache, making him resemble Kurt Vonnegut.

After college in Toronto, Sutherland moved to the U.K. in the late 1950s, where he studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. From here he acted with the Perth Repertory Theatre in Scotland, and in West End Productions such as Lindsay Anderson’s adaptation of Spoon River Anthology. Then he began to get cast on British tv shows like The Avengers and The Saint, and a Terry-Thomas variety special. Despite this period of living and working in the Mother Country, Sutherland’s British accent was pretty terrible. In this connection I would direct you to the psychedelic curiosity Joanna (1968) starring ‘6os It Girl Genevieve Waite, in which Sutherland was pretty unconvincing as an eccentric British lord. The film is well worth watching for many reasons, but Sutherland’s performance was not one of them. But it was early days yet.

His first movie Castle of the Living Dead (1964) was directed by Warren Kiefer, hence the naming of his oldest son Kiefer Sutherland (b. 1966). Christopher Lee starred in the film, and Sutherland played three supporting parts. It was the first of several movies Sutherland was to make in Italy. Others included Nicholas’s Roeg’s moody 1973 adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now, which was shot on location in Venice; and two in 1976, Bertolucci’s 1900, which contains one of the most disturbing scenes I have seen in any movie (it involves a sadistic child murder), and of course his performance as the title character in Fellini’sCasanova. And, for partial credit, you might include his brief scenes in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job.

Castle of the Living Dead also began an association with horror that would also encompass Die! Die! My Darling (1965), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), The Shuttered Room (1967), Don’t Look Now (1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and The Puppet Masters (1994).

For a time, Sutherland was so closely associated with comedies that many no doubt considered him primarily a comic actor. He had been a member of a Toronto comedy troupe back in his college days, and his chops were strong in this department. Many of these films are black comedies or satires, but they still fall under the comic rubric. It started with his bravura performance as Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), surely on anyone’s short list for his greatest performances. So indelible is his turn in this film, that many find it impossible not to imitate the character after watching it (at least that was my experience as a teenager!) That very same year, he appeared opposite Gene Wilder in Bud Yorkin’s hilarious Start the Revolution Without Me, and starred in Paul Mazurky’sAlex in Wonderland, the director’s follow-up to Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which had featured Sutherland’s M*A*S*H co-star Elliott Gould. Later Sutherland and Gould would be re-teamed in the much less successful CIA spoof S*P*Y*S (1974). Other comic and satirical films in his corpus include Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders (1971, directed by Alan Arkin); Alan Myerson’s Steelyard Blues (1973); the astounding Day of the Locust (1975), in which he played Homer Simpson, inspiration for the name of the cartoon character; and the two John Landis comedies The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), and of course Animal House (1978), where everyone got to look at his hairy bum.

Not to be neglected is Sutherland’s Jane Fonda period, 1970-72. Both were anti-war activists. Fonda had literally gone to North Vietnam; Sutherland was in such things as M*A*S*H and Little Murders. In 1971 they embarked on a sort of anti-U.S.O. tour intended to provide an alternative to Bob Hope’s patriotic road show. So you see, even this story has an unexpected vaudeville angle! The Free the Army Show had sketches written by Jules Feiffer, Herb Gardner, and Barbara Garson, and performances by the likes of Sutherland, Fonda, Peter Boyle,Dick Gregory, Alan Myerson, Janis Joplin, Holly Near, Country Joe and the Fish, et al. Believe it or not, this show actually toured military bases! The country was very different back then. A documentary/concert film, titled F.T.A., was made of the revue in 1972.

Meanwhile, Fonda and Sutherland had a two-year affair, despite the fact that she was still married to Roger Vadim. They co-starred in Klute and Steelyard Blues, then parted ways when she married activist Tom Hayden. During this period Sutherland was also in the 1971 antiwar film Johnny Got His Gun, written by Dalton Trumbo.

There’s still over 40 years to cover! Time, space, and attention spans demand that I wrap this up, so I’ll just mention some key performances and personal favorites. These include Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery (1978) with Sean Connery; Bob Clark’s Sherlock Holmes/ Jack the Ripper romp Murder By Decree (1978) with Christopher Plummer and James Mason; Robert Redford’s family drama Ordinary People (1980); the 1981 adaption of Ken Follett’sEye of the Needle; the Brat Pack comedy Heaven Help Us (1985); the Gaughin bio-pic The Wolf at the Door (1986); the Apartheid drama A Dry White Season (1989); Oliver Stone’sJFK (1991); Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991 and its later sequel); the original 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the screen version of John Guare’sSix Degrees of Separation; and a tv movie of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1994). Then came Virus (1995), Outbreak (1999), Instinct (1999), and Panic (2000) — not a lot of creative ferment happening in Hollywood at the time! In 2000 came Clint Eastwood’s old guy astronaut movie Space Cowboys. Ye Gods, that was a quarter century ago! There was the Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003), the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightly and Mathew McFayden, Reign Over Me (2007) with Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle, the Hunger Games movies (2012-2015), James Gray’sAd Astra (2019), and Roland Emmerich’s dreadful Moonfall (2022). There are SCORES of credits beyond these. His most recent credits was a recurring role on Lawmen: Bass Reeves (2023). He has basically never stopped being in demand.

Sutherland remained loyal to his native Canada, by the way. A substantial percentage of the films and TV appearances he made throughout his long career were Canadian. I only omit to mention most of them because I haven’t seen them! In 1978 he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, the second highest such honorary distinction his country bestows on its citizens.

For more on the various forms of vaudeville,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on classic screen comedy, please see: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube. And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.