Donald Sutherland, shape-shifting movie star, dies at 88

Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died Thursday in Miami. He was 88.

His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Donald Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.

With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said, “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”

Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows; some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.

And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).

Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.

“For me, working with these great guys was like falling in love,” Sutherland said of those filmmakers. “I was their lover, their beloved.”

He was far from a willing lover early on; he acknowledged having been unduly rigid about how a role should be played. But by 1981, he was telling Playboy magazine that “film acting is about the surrender of will to the director.” He was so in thrall to some directors that he named his four sons after them, including Kiefer, named in homage to Warren Kiefer, with whom he had worked early in his career. He also had a daughter, Rachel, Kiefer’s twin.

Sutherland first came to the attention of many moviegoers as one of the Army misfits and sociopaths in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), set during World War II. His character had almost no lines until he was told to take over from another actor.

“You with the big ears — you do it!” he recalled the director, Robert Aldrich, yelling at him. “He didn’t even know my name.”

While Sutherland worked almost nonstop to the very end, some of his more memorable roles fell in a stretch from 1970 to 1981, when he appeared in 34 films, often playing men who walked a fine line between sanity and madness — and on occasion erased that line. His fascist in Bertolucci’s “1900” (1976), his heavily made-up Lothario in “Fellini’s Casanova” (1976) and his murderous World War II spy in “Eye of the Needle” (1981) were examples of his capacity for the grotesque and the ominous.

But he could also be winningly irreverent, as in a pivotal early role: Hawkeye Pierce, an insolent mobile-hospital surgeon, in Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H” (1970), set during the Korean War but with distinctly Vietnam-era sensibilities. Ten years later, he stretched his emotional range further in “Ordinary People,” Robert Redford’s debut as a director, in which he played a beleaguered suburban husband and father struggling to hold his family together after a son drowned.

Donald McNichol Sutherland was born July 17, 1935, in Saint John, a coastal town in New Brunswick. He was married three times, always to actresses: Lois Hardwick, Shirley Douglas and Francine Racette, a French Canadian whom he wed in 1990.

© 2024 The New York Times Company