Donald Sutherland Death: Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.
The Announcement
His son Kiefer Sutherland announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died after an unspecified “long illness.”
With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”
Donald Sutherland Films Career
And yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. His chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.
“For me, working with these great guys was like falling in love,” Mr. Sutherland said of those filmmakers. “I was their lover, their beloved.”
He was far from a willing lover early on; he acknowledged having been unduly rigid about how a role should be played. But by 1981 he was telling Playboy magazine that “film acting is about the surrender of will to the director.” He was so in thrall to some directors that he named his four sons after them, including Kiefer, named in homage to Warren Kiefer, with whom he had worked early in his career. He also had a daughter, Rachel, Kiefer’s twin.
Mr. Sutherland first came to the attention of many moviegoers as one of the Army misfits and sociopaths in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), set during World War II. His character had almost no lines until he was told to take over from another actor.
“You with the big ears — you do it!” he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. “He didn’t even know my name.”
While Mr. Sutherland worked almost nonstop to the very end, some of his more memorable roles fell in a stretch from 1970 to 1981, when he appeared in 34 films, often playing men who walked a fine line between sanity and madness — and on occasion erased that line. His fascist in Bertolucci’s “1900” (1976), his heavily made-up Lothario in “Fellini’s Casanova” (1976) and his murderous World War II spy in “Eye of the Needle” (1981) were examples of his capacity for the grotesque and the ominous.
