Donald Sutherland was an utterly unique actor and irreplaceable star: possessed of a distinctive leonine handsomeness that the white beard of his latter years only made more majestic: watchful, cerebral, charismatic, with a refinement to his screen acting technique comparable perhaps only to Paul Scofield and his Canadian background (together with his early stage training and experience in England and Scotland) gave his American roles a certain touch of Anglo-international class. Sutherland was commanding and exacting, he gave each of his roles and films something special: he addressed his co-stars and the camera itself from a position of strength.
Even playing a weak or absurd character, as he did starring as the preposterous womaniser in Federico Fellini’s Casanova in 1976, finally reduced to the job of a librarian in a German count’s castle, brooding grotesquely over the phantoms of past lovers, Sutherland was still strong, still mesmeric, his intelligent face still sympathetic as Casanova, even though resembling a non-priapic gargoyle. For Bertolucci in his Italian epic 1900, he played an actual fascist, the gruesomely named Attila, and though certainly very far from sympathetic, he played the role with a sickeningly twinkle-eyed dynamism.
In the latter years, he tended towards gravitas (and it’s a shame there is no screen Lear from Sutherland) but in his heyday could convey bulging-eyed rage, joy, glee or malice – or a grinning satiric detachment, as he did in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H in 1970, as Hawkeye Pierce, the brilliant but irresponsible army field surgeon in Korea, a live-wire dissident, thrumming with directionless unused energy, rather different from the laidback drollery that Alan Alda settled into for the same part on TV.
Sutherland could do villainy or sensuality or the cares of a decent man bearing the burden of leadership or grief. He gravitated to complex leader roles and repeatedly directors found that it was Sutherland who had the intellectual seriousness and emotional maturity to play a complex father figure, a troubled paterfamilias – as in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and perhaps most sensationally of all, his role as the art historian John Baxter in Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, the 1973 ghost story adapted from the short story by Daphne Du Maurier.
Sutherland’s range in this movie is superb: he is heartrending as the man who has to pull his young daughter’s dead body from the pond at the beginning – and deeply affecting as the husband who rebuilds his emotional and erotic relationship with his wife as they struggle to deal with their grief. He and Julie Christie gave us what I still think is the most natural and authentic “married couple” in movie history – and they famously starred in cinema’s most remarkable sex scene; making love in a Venice hotel room to heal their emotional pain, the first time they have done so since their child’s death, and this sequence is intercut with scenes of them dressing afterwards, elegantly showing how commonplace and yet precious marital sex actually is. Perhaps it was Don’t Look Now which made possible his role in Ordinary People, as the father dealing with the accidental death of one of his sons.
In 1971, Sutherland made his own decisive contribution to the unhappy American zeitgeist with his lead role in Alan Pakula’s noir-paranoia thriller Klute, playing the gumshoe detective of the title who puts Jane Fonda’s call girl under surveillance, on the grounds that she may have something to do with a businessman’s disappearance, and the movie lets us decide just how much of a kick Sutherland’s hardbitten detective is getting out of this particular job, particularly as he and Fonda are naturally to become involved. It is a fascinating performance, though perhaps as Sutherland did not precisely have the conventional movie-star sexiness of, say, Redford or his M*A*S*H co-star Elliott Gould (who memorably played a detective in Altman’s The Long Goodbye) or the roughed-up method earthiness of a Hoffman or a De Niro or a Nicholson, his career played a little outside, or alongside, the A-list superstars of the era.
But his roles were always intensely flavoured with his indomitable personality as an actor: the repressed lovelorn accountant in John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust in 1975, even the dopey felon in Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen who is tasked with pretending to be a general – perhaps on the grounds that his natural low intelligence makes him well placed to imitate the mediocre officer class. It was a hint of anti-war satire that presaged M*A*S*H.
In his mature years, Sutherland often settled into potent cameos and supporting roles: but he was superbly cast in Six Degrees of Separation as the man duped by Will Smith’s character pretending to be the son of Sidney Poitier – intelligent, but fatally conceited.
For me, his most piercingly sad – and angriest – later role was the white South African schoolmaster in Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season who takes an initially diffident interest in the fact that his black gardener’s blameless son has been taken away (and, we discover later, murdered) by the authorities – and he becomes radicalised realising that his whole life has been in the service of a racist ruling class, who all turn on him for siding against his own caste. It is sensational when Sutherland’s character actually slaps the headmaster’s face for calling him a “traitor”.
Sutherland was an aristocrat of screen actors.
