How do you tell whether the actor you're working with is one of the greatest of all time?
You're at a loss on what to do after they pass away.
I will thus restate Kiefer, the son of Donald Sutherland, who announced his father's passing at the age of 88 today: "I personally think he was one of the most important actors in the history of film." This is the closest thing you'll find to a declaration of truth, even with the first-person qualification. Few actors contributed as much to the popularity and endurance of the medium or were in as many critically acclaimed films throughout their careers. Few actors gave as much of themselves to any role—big or small, paid or unpaid—as they did to this one. Not many actors were as entertaining to watch.
Great and well-liked was Donald Sutherland. Ask any acting enthusiast to select their favourite performance by this man, and they will take a minute to consider it and perhaps change their mind a few times. If any other actor had played even one of his roles in Ordinary People, Don't Look Now, Klute, Six Degrees of Separation, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Dirty Dozen, or M*A*S*H, they might have been stuck playing that role for the rest of their lives. That's how flawless and true his performances are. Rather, the roles were distinct, stand-alone, and unrelated to any other Sutherland job.
He obviously enjoyed playing complex, sometimes unlikable characters, particularly in auteur films with a strong Ahab influence, like as Fellini Casanova, 1900, and A Dry White Season. However, he was also able to excel in parts that on paper might have seemed standard-issue, such as the uninterestingly brutal President Snow in the Hunger Games films (which might serve as 'gateway drug' roles for future Sutherland completists, given that the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings films introduced audiences to Christopher Lee). Sutherland kept producing incredibly detailed, frequently groundbreaking work far into his seventies and eighties, whether he was portraying a senior citizen with Alzheimer's in The Leisure Seeker or J.
Even an old Hollywood chestnut like "hard-ass coach who only wants the best from his athlete and secretly loves him like a son" could be cracked open in a way that would turn even the most cynical moviegoer into a sobbing mess thanks to Sutherland's acute sense of the most honest way to enter a moment. That was from the movie Without Limits. Gary Cooper's portrayal of Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees, where he tells the crowd he's the luckiest man on the planet, also deserves a spot in the Sports Movie Tear Gas Hall of Fame.You get the impression that you're watching a film of an everyday man being invited to speak at a funeral service rather than a sports drama with stereotypical characters as Sutherland stands in front of the mourners. In Ordinary People and Nicolas Roeg's nonlinear horror drama Don't Look Now, he plays two grieving parents whose performances plunge the audience into the very centre of this particular kind of pain, marked by a mix of traumatised numbness and a desperate grasp for comforts from home, such as the opportunity to support the home team at a high school swim meet, an overly quiet family dinner that ignores the absence of a loved one, or an anxious and needy tryst.
From the moment of his breakthrough in the late 1960s, he appeared exceptional. He earned his stripes performing on Canadian stages and television for many years before going on to star in a number of counterculture-focused war films, such as The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, and M*A*S*H. He then rose to prominence as a leading man in films such as Klute, Don't Look Now, Casanova, Steelyard Blues, and the 1978 reimagining of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which served as the inspiration for one of the most iconic scenes in horror cinema history: Sutherland pointing and screaming in what is now an unavoidable meme.Sutherland established himself as one of those performers you were always happy to see, especially when you didn't realise he was even in a movie, beginning in that decade and continuing throughout his life.
He was a hedonistic and bohemian Marxist who co-directed the anti-Vietnam War documentary FTW alongside Jane Fonda. Due to his political activity, he was placed under CIA observation. He never quite gave up on Tom Baker's moustachioed brother who had just hitched a ride from the community in Dr. Who. He claimed he had failed his first movie audition because the filmmakers had wanted "a guy-next-door sort of guy, and to be absolutely truthful, we don't think you look like you ever lived next door to anybody" in a 2017 60 Minutes profile.
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