After his breakthrough in “M.A.S.H.,” he went on to a versatile career in films such as “Klute,” “Animal House,” “Ordinary People” and “The Hunger Games.”
Donald Sutherland, an actor of breathtaking range who became one of the most compelling players in cinema, whether portraying a misfit combat surgeon, an inscrutable cop, a grieving father or a futuristic tyrant, died June 20 in Miami. He was 88.With his lilting, velvety baritone and ghoulishly expressive features — gangly frame, prominent ears, wolfish smile and chilling green eyes — Mr. Sutherland perhaps unsurprisingly began his movie career in horror films.
He said he was crushed by the response and was further dismayed to have it reinforced when he first tried out for a movie role. As he recalled in interviews, a producer rejected him for a part as a “next door sort of guy” on the grounds that “we don’t think you look like you ever lived next door to anybody.”
Off-screen Mr. Sutherland and Fonda became lovers for nearly two years, during which time they emerged as two of Hollywood’s busiest actors and most outspoken politically on the left. Mr. Sutherland said he turned down leading roles in “Deliverance” and “Straw Dogs” — both sizable hits — because of their violence, and instead appeared in the documentary, which followed him and Fonda as they perform in a roving antiwar USO-type show on college campuses and near military installations.
The movie won four Oscars, including best picture, best director, best actress and best supporting actor . Even the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, a critic whom Mr. Sutherland had made an enemy after once calling her a “jolly little lady,” praised his “graceful” characterization. His father pushed him to focus on a practical trade, and Mr. Sutherland studied engineering at the University of Toronto before switching his major to English. He also gravitated to theater — getting laughs and applause for his small debut role in James Thurber’s “The Male Animal,” for which he had auditioned on a dare. “I have never, ever had it so good,” he later reminisced.
“'You with the big ears, you do it,'” Mr. Sutherland remembered Aldrich saying to him, the least-known member of a cast that included. “I don’t think he knew my name. … It changed my life.” His performance in “The Dirty Dozen” helped persuade Altman to pluck him from relative obscurity for “M.A.S.H.”
Mr. Sutherland became ubiquitous on-screen over the next decades, whether portraying a ruthless German spy in the World War II thriller; Paul Gauguin in the Danish-French production “The Wolf at the Door” ; a South African schoolteacher coming to grips with apartheid in “A Dry White Season” ; a mysterious colonel in Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-driven
Mr. Sutherland’s first marriage, to Lois Hardwick, a child star in silent movies, ended in divorce in 1966, as did his second marriage, to left-wing activist Shirley Douglas, who in 1969 was arrested in Los Angeles by the FBI for raising money to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers. The charges were later dropped.
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