Donald Sutherland: 3 Career-Defining Performances

Donald Sutherland, actor extraordinaire, passed away on 20th June 2024 aged 88. Born in Saint John, Canada, on the 17th July 1935, he was a poorly child, suffering from rheumatic fever and polio (to name but a few of his illnesses). Despite this sickly start, he pulled through and set about life with gusto. A part-time job as a news correspondent for a local radio station at the age of 14, and a several-month stint as an exchange student in Finland at 17, offered hints of the extraordinary life he would eventually live.

After studying Engineering and Drama at Victoria University, Sutherland went to study at the London Academy of Music and Drama in 1957. He began working on television throughout the late 1950s and early 60s to learn his trade, moving to Scotland early on. He appeared in several films with Christopher Lee, and the Hammer production Fanatic (Die! Die! My Darling! in the USA), early in his career.

He would achieve success with the release of The Dirty Dozen, the fifth-highest earner of the year, in 1967. After this, young Donald Sutherland would never look back, moving to Hollywood and beginning to star in films alongside Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Gene Wilder, Michael Caine and others in just the next few years. His path to international success and stardom was established. Over the next several decades, he would carve himself out as an astonishing leading man with an incredible stage presence, able to play villains and heroes with equal ease.

Time goes by, and Sutherland keeps working. Right up until his passing, he worked and worked, even if the amount of roles per year were managed to keep up with his age. A proud Canadian and officer of the Order of Canada, his passing brought forth tributes from prime ministers, presidents and actors alike. One of the greatest actors to never have been nominated for an Academy Award, he was given the Academy’s Honorary Award in 2017. In our own tribute to one of the greatest actors of the silver screen, The Film Magazine presents three films which show off the talents of a rightful icon.

1. M*A*S*H (1970)

It’s amazing to think that one of the most beloved sitcoms in the USA began as a film adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel, “MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors”.

Set in the depths of the Korean War, but very much with the Vietnam War in mind (which was ongoing at the time of filming and release), this comedy war film puts a couple of army doctors in a camp they don’t care for, getting up to a host of hijinks and shenanigans, scrapes and slapsticks, just trying to make the most of being posted out to a place they don’t care for, drafted up with no choice in the matter.

With an all-star cast of rising giants like Robert Duvall, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, and of course Donald Sutherland, the film’s constant play between hilarity and horror gives it legs that it might not otherwise have had. An Oscar-winning script by Ring Lardner Jr has it treading a very fine line, with a particular sequence involving one of the men wishing to kill themselves over beliefs they might be homosexual being the most striking, especially when homosexuality had only begun to be decriminalised in the USA eight years earlier. The main theme song, “Suicide Is Painless“, encapsulates the perverse, blackly comedic nature of the film.

Through it all, Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye reigns supreme. His charming smile, quick wit and genuine skill as a surgeon bring the whole unit together. His slacker attitude is not through laziness but choice, a wish to get as much fun out of the world as he can. There are parts that might not be appropriate now, and some of his antics are breaches of privacy, if not abuse, and show the thin line the film walks. War is not pretty, even when you don’t have your hands deep in a man’s brain trying to save them from the abyss. Darkness tinges almost everything in the film, and when Donald Sutherland gives one of those deeper expressions, when Hawkeye steps away from the laughs and, for a moment, understands that the laughter is to cover something up, it is impossible not to feel it deep in your core.

2. Don’t Look Now (1973)

If you needed an iconic look for an iconic actor, Donald Sutherland’s rolling locks and very 1970s moustache running around the streets of Venice would be the one to go for.

A Daphne Du Maurier adaptation surprisingly not by Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Roeg directs a twisting thriller of ghostly grief with Sutherland and Oscar-winner Julie Christie mourning the loss of their young daughter, Christine. In Venice, visions of their child, clad in a red coat, seem to follow them everywhere. And, in the midst of all the grief and the shadows, a killer stalks the streets.

Roeg’s twisting, turning art-house thriller, filled with surreal imagery, slow-motion flashbacks, symbols and metaphors, is a stunning look at grief. It is more than a horror thriller, an urban gothic ghost tale with the Italian giallo backdrop. It is an examination of how two people deal with grief and terror, how they look for meaning in their lives whilst growing apart from each other, how death follows you until the very end.

Sutherland’s distraught John Baxter is played to perfection, an incredible range of emotional turmoil played out in such a short space of time. From trying to put on a brave face and smile through his work, to denial, to impossible belief in the beyond, his is a tale of a man restoring his life by finding patterns in things never there, in mosaics or shattered glass. His is a tale of finding meaning in seemingly nothing, of accepting but never mourning, and it leads him into danger and despair. Sutherland’s performance is one that nobody else could have managed, and surely stands as one of the best of the genre, his career, and cinema as a whole.

3. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers Review

Sure, Donald Sutherland is a great actor, but just how good? Could he, for example, make one of his most iconic moments be nothing more than standing in a city park, pointing at someone, and screeching? As it turns out, he can, and in the remake/re-adaptation of ‘The Body Snatchers’, which transplants the original film/book’s location of a small American town to San Francisco, where a race of alien beings create emotionless pod-person imitations of the whole of the human race, he well and truly gives the entire world the shivers without a single line of dialogue.

That’s just the one scene. In the rest of the film, he is Matthew Bennell, fighting alongside a great cast of past, present, and future genre stalwarts such as Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, and Leonard Nimoy, to stop the world being overrun by the lifeless alien clones. Paranoia seeps deep into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world, and when you’re not sure who is who and if anyone is truly on your side, you need a hell of a frontman to keep you grounded. Everyone could be human, or they could be them.

Luckily, Donald Sutherland manages to pull off just that character we need in the midst of the oncoming apocalypse. Dressed and made up very similarly to his appearance in Don’t Look Now (complete with his somewhat iconic moustache), his down-to-earth portrayal of Bennell keeps the viewer both on side and confident in victory. He’s sensible, educated, but also willing to jump into a fight and get into a scrape. He’ll do whatever he needs to, sacrifice himself if that’s what it comes to, to keep people safe and protected. Despite this, there’s still some of that cheekiness remaining from M*A*S*H, and by the end some of the damage endured from Don’t Look Now. It’s an incredible performance, and one of the best of his long and distinguished career.

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Donald Sutherland would go on throughout the decades, making appearances in Oscar winners like JFK, as the first trainer of Buffy in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and perhaps embedding himself in a newer audience’s mind as President Coriolanus Snow in the first four The Hunger Games films. In a sixty-year career on film, on television, in theatre, and even in a 1993 video game, he was one of the absolute giants and impossible to imitate. Passing away on 20th June 2024, he will be sorely missed. The world of cinema was much richer for his presence, and is much poorer for his loss.