By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart
At university, they decided I should study Film and Television Studies. I had gone there for drama and history, but they needed to slot a third option into my first year. I had little interest in film but did watch a lot of television. It was the seventies, there was not a lot else to do, even if there were only three channels on. Now, having been an academic advisor, I can see their logic: back then I hated it.
And so began a love/hate relationship with the media of the celluloid and the small screen. Now, I have put away such childish thoughts and embraced both. Having failed my Film and Television Studies in first year, it could have left some kind of mental scar on my career, but it never did. Why? Because the quality of what we got to study stayed with me forever. I may have never gone back to watch a Jean Luc Godard, but I have watched a lot of Hitchcock and have a very healthy respect for Canadian actors.
Donald Sutherland is to blame for the latter.
I think that Scots like Canada, partly because our relationship to England often feels like a Canadian’s relationship to America: like some kind of annoying little cousin who is to be tolerated more than loved because they are always judged in the shadows of their bigger family member. And so, when it was announced that we would be studying Klute with Jane Fonda and Sutherland, I attended the screening with little enthusiasm except when they announced that Sutherland was not American but Canadian. I watched the film, found it fascinating but a little formulaic – I had become an aficionado of television crime series by this time and this was supposed to be some kind of mystery. I then dutifully attended the analysis the following day with some ideas of why I liked it. After 90 minutes of analyzing camera angles, a feminist perspective and one lecturer “going off on one” because rather than being the radical piece of film some claimed, he thought it was actually a voyeur’s paradise.
I felt that my appreciation of Sutherland was being ruined because of the critique of his male role within the film. Stubborn, as I am, it led me to look out more of his work. But it was the seventies and Blockbuster was still to be founded. Finding more work with him in it was difficult.
But let me leap towards the last time I saw him, and it was on the small screen in Crossing Lines, a European drama, which had one of my former Youth Theatre members, Stuart Martin, in it. Drawn by the fact that it was a pan European production, and in the midst of a political storm in the United Kingdom over our relationship with Europe, it was taught, tense and a pretty good piece of television drama. Partly the reason for this was pretty obvious – Sutherland gave it heft, weight and gravitas. I was reminded of why it was I had liked him all those many years ago. And with his death at 88, after a long illness, announced by his son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, we have lost an under stated star.
He was a star who had the ability to straddle media and perform in roles which many probably saw as being beneath them, but he inhabited with grace and poise, as a consummate actor of great skill.
The list of his films and achievements marks him out as his son said as, “one of the most important actors in the history of film.” Over more than 50 years, he managed 200 films, many of them seminal in the development of how we see cinema. Klute was the first to challenge the idea of a masculine point of view and no matter how successful it was, it categorized the fire that epitomized Sutherland’s way of working – he knew what he was going into and wanted to contribute.
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Sutherland, began life who suffered such serious illnesses such as rheumatic fever, polio and hepatitis. His father was a local businessman, his mother a maths teacher, and Sutherland became enrolled at Victoria College graduating with a double major in engineering and drama. The latter was to become his passion. He began his career as a radio news reporter before going to London to the London Academy of Music and Drama (LAMDA) to train. It was 1957.
Small roles came his way in British film and television, as well as in theatre as he came north to Scotland to work at Pitlochry Theatre in the Highlands, before he got his biggest break and a role with which many associated him for some time – Sergeant Oddball in M*A*S*H. by then he had chalked up The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s heroes, marking him out by the early 1970’s as an actor of great ability but also able to carry the vagaries of war in his performances. But his own point of view saw him, along with Jane Fonda, his co-star in Klute, perform in an anti-Vietnam war tour in Hawaii, Japan and in the Philippines, a production called FTA (Fuck the Army) which Sutherland co-write, co-directed and co-produced.
But his work never dried up and his range was remarkable, as he bagged roles as Homer Simpson, in The Day of the Locust, in 1900 playing a fascist thug, or a sadistic British army officer in Revolution, or that monologue in JFK he delivers with such aplomb. In the small screen he shone in Commander in Chief, less so in Buffy, but then he also got to act alongside his son in A Time to Kill. His voice mellifluously narrates the TV series, Great Books and according to legend it his ears had not been noticed by Robert Aldrich, he might never have made such a career. Legend has it that when one actor refused to act in a scene in the Dirty Dozen, Aldrich took it on the chin, turned, pointed at Sutherland and said, “you with the big ears. You do it”
The rest, as they say, was his and our collective history.
It was a history which began with conflict, often clashing with directors to try and impose his thinking, eventually he realized his error and sought to contribute and offer rather than put his foot down. But like his screen acting, some of his choices were risky and onstage he landed the lead as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, adapted by Edward Albee, in 1981. It ran for 12 performances before closing as 17 years away from the stage was not good preparation for Broadway, for anyone.
His range of roles was therefore immense. As well as the films already mentioned, I struggle to think of anyone who could have taken on convincingly roles in films like Ordinary People, played an IRA member in the Eagle Has Landed, taken the lead in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and been President Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games as well as appearing in National Lampoon’s Animal House. In 2017, he was to receive and Honorary Academy Award, but to the embarrassment of the profession, given the cannon of work, Sutherland may have appeared in Oscar winning movies, he never got the acclaim he deserved. As is so often the case, popularity can often trump and beat quality. He did, however, find himself touted for a Golden Globe in 2020’s The Undoing.
Sutherland married more than once, had more than Kiefer as an offspring but to the general public, all we need concern ourselves with is his fantastic career. And for that I shall leave you with two references as quoted on the BBC obituary.
“Helen Mirren, who appeared opposite Sutherland in 2017 film The Leisure Seeker, paid tribute to her “friend” and “one of the smartest actors I ever worked with” in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “He had a wonderful enquiring brain, and a great knowledge on a wide variety of subjects,” she said. “He combined this great intelligence with a deep sensitivity, and with a seriousness about his profession as an actor. This all made him into the legend of film that he became. He was my colleague and became my friend. I will miss his presence in this world.”
“We asked the kindest man in the world to portray the most corrupt, ruthless dictator we’ve ever seen,” the official Hunger Games X account posted following the announcement of his death. “Such was the power and skill of Donald Sutherland’s acting that he created one more indelible character among many others that defined his legendary career. We are privileged to have known and worked with him, and our thoughts are with his family.”
As are ours, though his own thoughts shall be shared later this year as his memoir, Made Up, But Still True, is due to be published in November. Donald McNichol Sutherland, actor; born 17 July 1935; died 20 June 2024.
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