How Donald Sutherland Became One of Canada’s Most Prolific Actors
1935-2024
Who Was Donald Sutherland?
Donald Sutherland was one of Canada’s most famous actors who appeared in more than 200 movies and TV shows. After struggling to find a foothold for several years, he was cast in The Dirty Dozen that led to his major breakout role in the 1970 movie M*A*S*H. Sutherland proved to be an actor of enormous versatility and prolific volume. Among his many movies were Klute, Ordinary People, A Time To Kill, Instinct, Cold Mountain, Pride & Prejudice, and The Hunger Games franchise. Sutherland won an Emmy Award for his role in the 1995 TV movie Citizen X and received an honorary Oscar in 2018. He died in June 2024 at age 88.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Donald McNichol Sutherland
BORN: July 17, 1935
DIED: June 20, 2024
BIRTHPLACE: Saint John, Canada
SPOUSES: Lois Hardwick (1959-1966), Shirley Douglas (1966-1970), and Francine Racette (1972-2024)
CHILDREN: Kiefer Sutherland, Rachel, Rossif, Angus, and Roeg
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
Early Life
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, a city in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. His mother, Dorothy, was a math teacher, and his father, Frederick, worked in sales and managed the local utility company. Together, they forged a standard middle-class home for their son. Sutherland later described his father as a self-involved, controlling man while his mother was a direct, loving presence in the youngster’s life.
Sutherland’s early childhood was shaped by poor health. The first word he learned to say was “neck” because that’s where he was in pain, a sign that the young boy was weathering the early onset of polio. One of his legs was shorter than the other as a result of the illness. Sutherland also dealt with bouts of hepatitis and rheumatic fever.
Resisting their son’s dreams of becoming a sculptor, Sutherland’s parents urged conventionality and successfully pushed him to study engineering at the University of Toronto.
While at university, Sutherland experienced his first exposure to acting. As the story goes, the first play Sutherland ever saw was one he had a small role in: a student production of Edward Albee’s The Male Animal during his junior year, for which he auditioned as a dare. Other shows followed, and in 1958, Sutherland graduated with dual degrees in engineering and drama.
After this, Sutherland moved to London to attend the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and completed an internship at the Perth Repertory Theater in Scotland. Still, he had an inauspicious start to his onscreen career.
Movies and TV Roles
Breakthrough with The Dirty Dozen
Although he had small appearances in British TV shows such as The Avengers, Sutherland initially struggled to find his footing in the industry. He recalled one early experience from 1962 in a GQ magazine magazine:
“I auditioned for the producer, the writer, the director. And I came home and said to my first wife, ‘I thought it went okay.’ You never want to say you did well before you know anything. The next morning they were all on the phone saying how wonderful the audition had been. And then the producer said, ‘We loved you so much, we wanted to explain why we weren’t casting you. We’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.’”
A year later, he did get a part in the 1963 British romantic drama The World Ten Times Over. But it didn’t lead to steady or even good-paying work. Thus, on the advice of his agent, a flat broke Sutherland moved to Hollywood in the mid-1960s.
Finally, his big break came in 1967 when he landed the small but significant role of Vernon Pinkley in the war movie The Dirty Dozen, starring Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, and Telly Savalas, among others. The Dirty Dozen went on to become the fifth highest-grossing film of the year. Leveraging that success, Sutherland found more work, including a part in the Clint Eastwood comedy Kelly’s Heroes (1970).
Major Success with M*A*S*H
It was around this time that Sutherland accepted the part that catapulted his career into stardom, starring as “Hawkeye” Pierce in the classic Robert Altman war comedy, M*A*S*H. The 1970 film, which also starred Elliot Gould and Tom Skerritt, proved to be a giant cultural and financial success, evoking surprise from even those who made the movie with its box-office results.
“I remember going up to the theater in New York at eleven o’clock in the morning on the first day M*A*S*H opened,” Sutherland later recalled in an Esquire interview. “These were the days before advertising, and the only word of mouth was from one screening in San Francisco two months earlier. We went to the theater early to see if it was going to sell any tickets. The line was twice around the block.”
Following M*A*S*H, Sutherland became a regular part of the Hollywood rotation. His acting style has been described as offbeat and precise, with an onscreen presence that was no doubt aided by his 6-foot, 4-inch frame. His versatility and range also allowed him not to be typecast.
Commercial Film Success
Over the next several decades, Sutherland appeared in a steady lineup of either critical or commercial successes. The list includes Klute (1971), co-starring Jane Fonda; Don’t Look Now (1973); Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978); Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980); A Dry White Season (1989); and JFK (1991).
His choices included some unconventional picks, too. In 1976, he teamed up with legendary Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini for Fellini’s Casanova, in which Sutherland portrayed the title character. Sutherland spoke in glowing terms about his time with the director, who provided a nurturing presence in a work experience that was both challenging and highly sensual. Two years later, Sutherland played a pot smoking professor in the John Landis comedy National Lampoon’s Animal House.
Hunger Games Trilogy and Later Roles
Sutherlands’ movie choices continued to vary, from the ’90s into the next millennium. Backdraft (1991), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), and A Time to Kill (1996) were followed by Space Cowboys (2000), The Italian Job (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005), and The Con Artist (2010). He also made the 2001 TV movie Uprising and worked on the 2004 miniseries Frankenstein.
In 2012, he played wicked President Snow in The Hunger Games, a role he reprised for the franchise’s subsequent movies: Catching Fire (2013) and the 2014 and 2015 installments of Mockingjay. Returning to the small screen, he took on the role of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty for the 2018 FX series Trust, about the infamous 1973 kidnapping of Getty’s grandson. His final role was on the Yellowstone spinoff series Lawman: Bass Reeves from 2023.
Death and Legacy
In all, Sutherland collaborated on more than 200 films and TV shows, working well into his 80s—an age when many of his contemporaries eased back on their schedules. “I’m going to be working until I’m helping them with the shovel,” he once said.
Sutherland died at age 88 on June 20, 2024 in Miami after a long illness. Hollywood talent agency CAA first confirmed the news to Deadline.
Sutherland’s eldest son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, paid tribute to his father in a post to social media site X. “I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film,” wrote Kiefer, who also shared a photo of himself as a child with Donald. “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.”
Awards and Honors
While considered one of Hollywood’s most esteemed actors, Sutherland received little Oscar attention and was never nominated for an Academy Award. In 2018, he accepted an honorary Oscar recognizing his body of work.
He was, however, nominated for nine Golden Globes and won two. His first win came in 1996 for his supporting role in the TV movie Citizen X, which also netted him an Emmy Award. In 2003, Sutherland won a second supporting actor Globe for his work in another TV film, Path to War. His most recent nomination was in 2021, for his supporting performance in the HBO miniseries The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
Sutherland’s home country also showed pride in its native son. In 1978, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and was inducted into the country’s Walk of Fame in 2000.
Wives and Children
While at the University of Toronto, Sutherland met his first wife, Lois Hardwick. The couple married in 1959, the first of Sutherland’s three marriages, and divorced seven years later without any children.
Following his divorce from Hardwick, Sutherland wed actor Shirley Douglas in 1966. The two were married for four years and had two children together: son Kiefer, who has gone on to forge his own successful screen career, and twin sister Rachel, who works behind the camera as a movie post-production supervisor.
Sutherland married again in 1972, this time to French Canadian actor Francine Racette, with the union lasting decades. The couple had three sons: Rossif, Angus and Roeg.
All four of his sons were named after directors he admired. Kiefer took after Warren Kiefer, Roeg after Nicolas Roeg, and Rossif after Frédéric Rossif. Angus’ middle name Redford was chosen for Robert Redford.
Sutherland also had a highly publicized affair with Jane Fonda, his co-star on Klute. Their relationship in the early 1970s dovetailed with their work together in an anti–Vietnam War comedy troupe.
Quotes
I haven’t found anything hard about being an actor except rejection, and I don’t even find that so hard.
[Jane Fonda and I] got together shortly before we made Klute, and then we were together until the relationship exploded and fell apart in Tokyo. And it broke my heart. I was eviscerated. I was so sad. It was a wonderful relationship right up to the point we lived together.
Ordinarily I choose things on a very instinctive basis. If I respond to the material emotionally, I take it one step further and go meet the director, because it’s his film. I must be able to understand the character that’s in his head, because that’s the character I must attempt to create for him.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a sexual involvement without love. I’ve never had a one-night stand. Though I was fascinated by Richard Burton saying that living with Elizabeth Taylor was like having a one-night stand every night.
It’s interesting how many good writers have really good women surrounding them.
He was my father and I wanted to please him. But yes, the minute I found success—pretty much after M*A*S*H was released, he didn’t do anything but complain about me.
I haven’t been very good about dealing with disappointment. I suffer it, and then when that suffering becomes a kind of predation, then it’s gone. Because the disappointment is not always realistic. It too is very subjective, and it has to do with hopes that weren’t realistic.
Working with [Federico Fellini on Casanova], it was so sensual. I’ve said it so many times—I was his concubine. He would tell me what to do, and I would know instantly how to do it. For me, it was wonderful. He said he felt it was the best film he had ever made—the Italian version, not the English version—and afterwards, after I had left that screening, I didn’t see him again, except in very formal circumstances. It was as if I had left a lover and didn’t know how to deal with it.
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