Donald Sutherland, 1935-2024

Elliott Gould, David Arkin, and Donald Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970).

Even in a roster as quirky as the list of actors who dominated American movies in the late sixties and early seventies, Donald Sutherland – who died at the end of June, just a month shy of his eighty-ninth birthday – was an outlier. Of course, he was different from his cohort in an obvious way: he was Canadian, born in the Maritimes and educated as an engineer at the University of Toronto, though he went on to train as an actor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. And he carried his Canadian identity with him always, through nearly six decades of a career in the U.S. – he never lost his accent or his elocution-class diction, and his acting virtues included distinctly Canadian qualities like modesty, gentleness, understatement and an ironic wit that you might miss if you weren’t listening closely enough. His skill at conveying the interior conflicts of decent men amounted to a sort of genius, and his best roles permitted him to move that skill, which has generally been relegated to supporting performances in Hollywood pictures, into the foreground. His slender six-foot-four frame made him appear paradoxically slight and imposing at the same time, as if he’d slipped off a hanger in a closet, and he had rather a goonish face (which his frequent beard tended to offset). He looked like a small-town Canadian square, but he was as much a hipster as Elliott Gould, who partnered him memorably in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the film that made them both famous. And, defying movie conventions, he was sexy at the same time, opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, Brooke Adams in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

M*A*S*H, a satirical comedy where the two actors play two-thirds of the surgeons in a mobile army hospital, the 4077th, at the height of the Korean War (the last third is Tom Skerritt), couldn’t work without that hipness, and it couldn’t have been so thoroughly a movie of its time if Sutherland as Hawkeye Pierce and Gould as Trapper John McIntyre weren’t so unexpectedly hip. The Korean setting is a blind, though a transparent one; everyone who saw it in the theatre in 1970 knew that it its target was really Vietnam, largely on account of the put-on style of the acting, which young moviegoers had already responded to three years earlier in Arthur Penn’s Depression-era Bonnie and Clyde. Many of the novice film performers, including Roger Bowen as the camp commander, Lt. Col. Henry Blake, came out of the improv troupe that evolved into Second City. What makes the comedy so unusual is that though almost everyone at the MASH unit is a goofball, a fish out of water like Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis and Danny Kaye in their military farces, in M*A*S*H the characters’ refusal to subsume their individuality to the demands of the army – which they can get away with because of their unconventional relationship, as medics, to the military establishment – amounts to a rebellion against its agenda, which the movie abhors, and against the very idea of conformity. So they’re hippies from a time two decades earlier than the hippies sitting in the audience applauding them, and their defiance, along with their struggle to save lives in the OR under ridiculous conditions, casts them as heroes. The only two characters in the movie who actually like the army, head nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) and Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), fall into the category Hawkeye calls “regular army clowns.”

The fact that some of the humor in Altman’s movie collides with our current cultural preferences has put its many fine aspects in the shade, and our distance from the time of its initial release has blurred the ways in which it was a breakthrough. But it’s difficult to overrate the actors. Sutherland’s physical work is subtle and rhythmic, like his shambling entrance at the top of the picture, laden down with bags (and golf clubs), when he shows up at the 4077th for the first time. He tosses off his lines, even when he’s making moves on a woman, and he whistles (usually just three notes) for ironic commentary. When Gould’s Trapper John joins the crew, not just Hawkeye but Sutherland the actor has an ideal partner in crime. Their comic chemistry is astonishing; they’re so relaxed together on screen that they make the Rat Pack in Ocean’s 11 or Robin and the 7 Hoods look like they’re straining.

Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (1973).

Sutherland played the male leads in a trio of the most unsettling films of the seventies: Klute (which he made the year after M*A*S*H), Don’t Look Now (from 1973) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). And in different ways the fact that all three of his characters are men we are drawn to and identify with underscores the terror in all three movies. Klute, directed by Alan J. Pakula from a rich, character-driven script by Andy and Dave Lewis, is a murder mystery. Don’t Look Now, directed by Nicolas Roeg with a script derived from a Daphne Du Maurier story, is a supernatural ghost story. Body Snatchers is a remake of the classic low-budget sci-fi picture but the writer, W.D. Richter, and the director, Philip Kaufman, have updated it from a small California town in the mid-1950s to San Francisco in the mid-1970s and added a witty satirical layer that lifts it, along with the filmmaking and the acting, into the stratosphere of the most fulfilling genre entertainments. (This version of Body Snatchers is to sci-fi movies what The Big Sleep is to film noirs.)

Though it’s a detective story, Klute has what feels like a romantic-comedy set-up. When his friend disappears, John Klute (Sutherland), a cop from a small town in Pennsylvania, takes a private-eye job in Manhattan to track him down because a letter links him to a New York prostitute named Bree Daniels (Fonda). Bree won’t talk to Klute until he moves into an apartment downstairs and makes tapes of her phone calls from her clients that she wants him to hand over to her. And then someone starts stalking her and she turns to him for protection. They become lovers, but this isn’t The Owl and the Pussycat with Barbra Streisand as the whore who loosens up the bookstore clerk played by George Segal, or Something Wild, where Jeff Daniels is the buttoned-up corporate guy who is picked up by Melanie Griffith in a Louise Brooks haircut and lured to a cheap motel for sex. Bree thinks Klute’s straight-arrow demeanor is hypocritical; that’s how she categorizes all squares. She hates not being in control, so when he starts to get to her emotionally, she throws his compassion and authenticity back in his face. The series of tests that the partners in a classic romantic comedy challenge each other with is altered in Klute and then altered again. She sets out to prove that he’s no different from her johns by treating him like one. Then she reconsiders, but every time she seems ready to walk away from her underground life she jumps right back into it, as if she needs to make it impossible for him to see her as anything but a hooker. But he keeps frustrating her efforts to reduce herself as well as to caricature him; in effect he passes every test she doesn’t realize she’s setting for him. The movie belongs to Fonda, who comes up with one of the most staggering pieces of acting ever put on film. But Sutherland is wonderful, and the movie needs what he brings to it. His pale blue eyes carry a steady, calm gaze that is also complex; it tells us everything we need to know about his responses to the world she takes him into and his immunity to it – and his ability to judge it without every judging her, because he’s moved by her and then he’s in love with her. Sutherland is loose in M*A*S*H but here he holds himself very straight. He’s not repressed, though; that strength comes from his unshakeable confidence in who he is.

In Don’t Look Now, Sutherland and Christie play John and Laura Baxter, a wealthy young couple living in the English countryside whose little daughter drowns in the pond in the opening sequence. The movie appears to be about the bottomless grief of losing a child, and that’s certainly the heart of Christie’s performance, but the idea is really just a plot device. When John lands a job restoring a church in Venice, Laura comes along. (Church restoration is a sexy, photogenic profession, and in Don’t Look Now Sutherland is expensively dressed in the elegant, flamboyant early-seventies fashions; he looks a step away from a rock star – and Roeg had made himself famous a few years earlier by directing Mick Jagger in Performance). In Venice the Baxters meet a pair of old ladies, sisters, one of whom is a blind seer who claims to detect the presence of the dead child. Laura is a true believer but John assumes the women are scam artists. What’s interesting about the movie, besides the extraordinary sophistication of the filmmaking – it’s one of the very few Nicolas Roeg pictures worth thinking about – is the beautiful work of the two stars, who paint a portrait of a difficult marriage that both partners are struggling to hold onto in the face of tragedy. The casting is perfect: Sutherland uses his earthbound definiteness while Christie draws on her gift for playing women who are all instinct and whose fragility gives them a wavering, elusive presence. (As Christie plays her, Laura seems to have lost layers of herself in her mourning for her daughter.) In the scene where Laura tries to convince John, spurred on by the psychic, that their dead child is sending him messages to alert him to approaching danger, she throws her anxiety at him in shattered pieces while he works hard to stay strong for her. But his efforts to stave off what he’s sure is supernatural gobbledygook makes him vulnerable because he reads the ghostly warnings as if they were actual events. The cheap irony of the plot is that he turns out to be the one with second sight, and it destroys him.

Donald Sutherland (centre) with Stockard Channing (right) in Six Degrees of Separation (1993).

The movie contains one of the most famous sex scenes ever shot: Roeg intercuts the lovemaking with shots of the couple putting on their clothes afterwards that are soaked in the aura of what preceded it. Everything in Don’t Look Now that addresses the relationship of the Baxters is deeply compelling, and Sutherland is once again superb in scenes with one of the period’s greatest actresses. Except for Warren Beatty in McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Shampoo, Julie Christie has never had a more pliant and sensual – or more complicated – leading man.

Sutherland plays a health inspector in Invasion of the Body Snatchers who closes down chic restaurants in restless pursuit of public health. His Matthew Bennell is the crusading warrior at the head of a small group of resourceful independent thinkers who fight to hold onto humanity when a species of interplanetary nomad plants set out to replicate and replace earthlings while they sleep. His scenes with Brooke Adams, who plays his assistant, are lovely, softly flirtatious. Though the movie has a sharp-witted supporting cast, Sutherland is, as in Klute, the calm center. And Kaufman gives him a marvelous scene, near the end, when Adams, who has lost the battle to stay awake, literally crumbles in his arms as her plant double waits in the wings. His declaration of love as she vanishes is a protest of humanity against the take-over of the zombies. It’s not quite as affecting as the scene at the beginning of Don’t Look Now when, too late, he drags his daughter out of the pond, but you recognize that you’re watching the same actor. In Klute and Don’t Look Now the accessibility and groundedness of Sutherland’s character offer a balance against the loose-cannon quality of the leading female figure; in Body Snatchers it challenges the threat of the alien invasion – it holds out hope. These men provide a way into the movies for the viewer. So there’s something particularly affecting about seeing them at moments where they lose their emotional compass, and the end of Body Snatchers, when we see that Matthew has turned into one of the pods, is horrifying, because we know all hope has finally been vanquished.

The fact that Sutherland tends to locate his characters solidly in a normal emotional range is, I think, his strongest acting tool. Look at his Cal Jarrett in Ordinary People (1980). Cal is a Lake Forest tax attorney, a decent, compassionate man whose optimism and profound belief in the possibility that the family he adores can rebound from tragedy – the death of his older son in a boating accident, followed by the suicide attempt of his younger son, Con (Timothy Hutton) – is challenged repeatedly until he faces the heartbreaking truth that his wife Beth (Mary Tyler Moore) is so remote and encased in her sense of herself as invulnerable that she can’t move forward or help Con to do so. Robert Redford’s movie, adapted by Alvin Sargent from a popular novel by Judith Guest, is infuriatingly rigged. The warm Jewish shrink Cal gets Con to see (played by Judd Hirsch) counsels the boy that he has to learn to forgive his mother, but the movie despises her because she’s incapable of loving him. Ordinary People is a fake family drama, but aside from poor, helpless Moore in the wicked witch role the actors are marvelous in it, especially Sutherland in his scenes with Hutton and his one extended scene with Hirsch. Sutherland brings all of his emotional reserves to bear on his portrayal of a man who is using all of his resources to rescue his family – to keep his son from sinking back into despair and his wife from turning her back on a boy that we can see, though he doesn’t under the end, she will never forgive for not being the brother who died in that accident.

Donald Sutherland in Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022).

There’s an effortlessness to Sutherland’s wholehearted display of emotion in his best work, like his performance in the little-known 1983 Canadian feature Threshold, where he plays a heart surgeon loosely based on Denton Cooley, the first doctor to transplant an artificial heart. The movie slipped by unnoticed on its release, but I opted to go back and look at it movie again after four decades because I had such pleasurable memories of Sutherland and some of the supporting players. The actor employs his aptitude for delicately nuanced understatement to great advantage here; his touch is so sure that before you realize it he has drawn the movie tightly around the character of Dr. Thomas Vrain, who dispenses ease kindness along with his patience and good sense. In one scene with his favorite patient, a twenty-one-year-old played with exquisite precision of feeling by Mare Winningham, the kindness is in valuing her gift of reason. He informs her that most transplant patients walk out cured after they think their last hope is gone and then adds almost nonchalantly, “That’s what tell most people anyway. You’re too smart for that.” The film, directed by Richard Pearce, is low-key and unpretentious – an honest piece of work. It functions in a kind of imitation of its star.

Sutherland never works in villain roles like the spy in Eye of the Needle or the head honcho in the Hunger Games series or, God knows, the murderous pedophilic fascist in Bertolucci’s 1900. These films don’t merely cast him against type; they dispense with all the characteristics that make him special. The surprise in his performances is more often that he finds unexpected ways to humanize characters: when he played Mr. Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, he substituted melancholy for misanthropy, and Wright was clever enough to let us see in passing his fondness for his impossible wife (Brenda Blethyn). But two occasions come to mind when he moves in unusual directions. One is Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Fred Schepisi’s brilliant transcription of the John Guare high comedy, where he and Stockard Channing play late-twentieth-century Manhattan aristocrats, an art dealer and his wife, whose lives are turned topsy-turvy when a young scam artist named Paul (Will Smith) shows up at their apartment on Central Park, claiming to be a Harvard friend of their children and, incidentally, the son of Sidney Poitier. This character isn’t like anything else Sutherland ever tried, but he’s ideal for it: he builds on the bourgeois dandyism he only hints at in Don’t Look Now as well as the tossed-off farce expertise he showed in M*A*S*H. Verbally it’s his most accomplished acting – he digs into Guare’s gloriously stylized prose without making a meal of it. When he and Channing relate the story of their encounter with Paul to other members of their rarefied social set at a wedding reception, his approach is theatrical, a parody of melodrama, but when he gets to the subject of the two-sided Kandinsky canvas in their apartment, his most precious possession, his voice becomes hushed, reverent. The verbal prestidigitation is stunning; suddenly you can imagine him playing Sheridan or Congreve. Channing’s Ouisa Kittredge is the movie’s protagonist; it’s all about the way the delusional young interloper alters forever her perspective on her own life (and her marriage). But Sutherland does much more than even admirers of Guare’s play could imagine with the role of the husband, Flan – he makes the character’s denial of his own susceptibility to Smith’s Paul tragic. When Ouisa demands at the end that he tell her how much of his life he can account for and he answers, “All of it! I am a gambler!,” there’s desperation just under the surface of his bravado. You catch your breath; you think, this man is lost.

No one paid much attention to Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, one of Sutherland’s last pictures, but he’s splendid in it. (And it’s a very creepy movie, deftly directed by John Lee Hancock.) Stephen King wrote the short story that generated it, so it’s damnably unnerving and as double-sided as the Kandinsky in the Kittredges’ domicile in Six Degrees of Separation. And it has dark notes of Dickens. Sutherland plays an irascible rich man in a small Maine town who hires a motherless little boy to read to him; the boy grows up in his employ and cherishes their unorthodox friendship. When Mr. Harrigan dies he leaves the boy (Jaeden Martell) two different sorts of legacies, one of them monetary and the other supernatural. Sutherland infuses the performance with recessive humor and subdued fierceness, sidestepping clichés about mysterious old billionaires. He drops out of the film in the middle but his spirit hovers over it through the end credits. You walk away with Donald Sutherland – his voice hoarse and pebbled but as adept as ever at glittering wit, his eyes as piercingly observant as John Klute’s – in your head, and he stays there for a long, long time.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies