Donald Sutherland

Info

Full Name: Donald McNichol Sutherland
Date of birth: July 17, 1935
Location: Saint John, New Brunswick
Country: Canada
Height: 1,92m
Died at: 88 years old (June 20, 2024)

Donald Sutherland died 2 years ago, on June 20, 2024. Their last recorded film was in 2023, and their first in 1967. They were active for 56 years, appearing in 49 films that averaged a rating of 7.0/10.

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Tráiler 'Días de agosto' (2026)

Biography

Donald Sutherland made around two hundred films across six decades, gave the movies some of their most unsettling images and never once received a competitive Oscar nomination, an omission the Academy only patched up with an honorary Oscar in 2017. He was born on 17 July 1935 in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, survived polio, rheumatic fever and hepatitis as a boy, worked in local radio at 14 and studied engineering and drama at the University of Toronto before choosing the stage and finishing his training at LAMDA in London.

He scraped a living in British television and low budget horror, and his first lead came in 'Castle of the Living Dead' (1964), directed by Warren Kiefer. The name stuck: when twins Rachel and Kiefer Sutherland were born in London in 1966, while he was shooting 'The Dirty Dozen' (1967), he named his son after the man who first bet on him.

'MASH', Jane Fonda and the counterculture

Stardom arrived with 'MASH' (1970), Robert Altman's war satire, which triumphed at Cannes and made him and Elliott Gould faces of the counterculture. The irony is that both stars, rattled by Altman's chaotic methods, tried to get him fired. The same year he played Oddball, the hippie tank commander of 'Kelly's Heroes', and in 1971 he was the maimed soldier of 'Johnny Got His Gun'.

On 'Klute' (1971) he fell for Jane Fonda on and off screen, a romance that lasted almost three years; while she won the Oscar, the pair toured an anti Vietnam War revue for American troops, filmed as 'F.T.A.' (1972), which earned him a place on Washington's unofficial blacklists.

'Don't Look Now' and the golden seventies

For British audiences his defining hour is 'Don't Look Now' (1973), Nicolas Roeg's Venetian masterpiece with Julie Christie, regularly voted among the greatest British films ever made, with a love scene so raw it fuelled rumours for decades. Federico Fellini buried him under prosthetics for 'Casanova' (1976) and Bernardo Bertolucci cast him as the sadistic fascist Attila in '1900' (1976). In between he was Liam Devlin, the IRA agent of the wartime thriller 'The Eagle Has Landed' (1976), shot in Britain.

He closed the decade with the final scream of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' (1978), one of science fiction's great endings, and the pot smoking professor of 'Animal House' (1978), where he took a flat fee instead of a share of the profits, a choice he cheerfully admitted cost him millions.

Snubbed by Oscar, adored by everyone else

In 'Ordinary People' (1980), Robert Redford's directing debut, he gave a masterclass in restraint as a father holding a shattered family together; the film won four Oscars including Best Picture, and he alone went unnominated. The nineties made him a prestige character actor: the shadowy Mr X of Oliver Stone's 'JFK' (1991), the art dealer of 'Six Degrees of Separation' (1993), the predatory boss circling Michael Douglas and Demi Moore in 'Disclosure' (1994) and the general of 'Outbreak' (1995); he had already lent his weight to the anti apartheid drama 'A Dry White Season' (1989). Television paid what cinema owed: an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the serial killer hunt 'Citizen X' (1995) and another Globe for 'Path to War' (2002).

Later he was Mr Bennet to Keira Knightley's Elizabeth in 'Pride and Prejudice' (2005), joined Clint Eastwood in 'Space Cowboys' (2000) and turned up in 'The Italian Job' (2003) and 'Cold Mountain' (2003). Then a dictator introduced him to a new generation: President Snow in 'The Hunger Games' (2012) and its three sequels, opposite Jennifer Lawrence. The part wasn't offered: he wrote to the producers asking for it, gripped by the saga's politics, and said openly that he wanted the films to wake up young audiences.

He never slowed down: Giuseppe Tornatore's 'The Best Offer' (2013), a last road trip with Helen Mirren in 'The Leisure Seeker' (2017), 'Ad Astra' (2019), oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in 'Trust' (2018), the patriarch of 'The Undoing' (2020) with Nicole Kidman and the Stephen King adaptation 'Mr. Harrigan's Phone' (2022).

He married three times, to Lois Hardwick, to Canadian actress Shirley Douglas, daughter of Tommy Douglas, the politician regarded as the father of Canada's public health system, and mother of Rachel and Kiefer, and found lasting happiness with Quebec actress Francine Racette, his partner for half a century and mother of his sons Roeg, Rossif and Angus. Canada made him a Companion of the Order of Canada, its highest civilian honour, in 2019. He died on 20 June 2024 in Miami at 88, after a long lung illness, leaving a memoir still tied up between delays and his estate's disputes. Kiefer's farewell summed him up: never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. His filmography proves the point.