Actor Donald Sutherland dies at 88

Donald Sutherland, a Canadian actor with a career spanning more than six decades, died on Thursday. The news was announced on social media by his son, Kiefer Sutherland, who is also a well-known actor. “With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away. I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived,” he said in a message.

Sutherland — who is known for his roles in The Dirty Dozen, Klute, Casanova, JFK and, more recently, The Hunger Games saga — received many awards throughout his lifetime, including an honorary Oscar in 2018 for his life’s work (though he was never nominated for Best Actor). He won the Golden Globe twice out of the nine times he was nominated: in 1996, thanks to his role in the miniseries Citizen X, for which he also won an Emmy Award, and in 2003, for the series Road to War. He was nominated for a BAFTA, a Critics Choice Award and even a Razzie for Lock Up in 1990. He has had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame since 2011.

At the beginning of his career, in his teens, Sutherland worked for a local radio station in his native Canada and after studying at the universities of Victoria and Toronto, he began his artistic career, which led him to the prestigious London School of Music and Dramatic Art. This led to small roles in British TV shows in the 1960s, with Sutherland becoming an increasingly familiar face in the U.K. During this period, Sutherland appeared in classic plays brought to the small screen, an episode of The Avengers and especially a small role of a couple of episodes in the then tremendously popular series The Saint.

These roles acted as a springboard to bigger parts and turned him into the iconic face of Vernon Pinkley in The Dirty Dozen, the 1967 war film directed by Robert Aldrich, where he co-starred with great names of the time such as John Cassavetes, Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin.

Throughout his career, Sutherland played leading and supporting roles, in film and television, but also in the theater, where he took his first steps in college (playing, among other roles, Stephano in Shakespeare’s The Tempest). He was always very attracted to the stage. “It’s a theater with arms that embrace you, comfort you, push you, applaud you. It gives birth to people who make theater. It nurtures them. It guides them. It sets them free and they wear the mantle of that theater for the rest of their lives,” said Sutherland about his passion for theater, in comments to the HartHouse Theater of the University of Toronto, where he began his career. HartHouse decided to create an award in his honor to pay tribute to the best performers.

Sutherland never thought about retirement. In fact, his most recent role as the devious President Snow in The Hunger Games — a blockbuster dystopia starring Jennifer Lawrence — had made him a star with a very different audience.

From the start of his career, Sutherland was also a vocal activist; so much so, that he was surveyed by U.S. intelligence services in the early 1970s — as revealed in 2017 thanks to declassified documents. In an interview with EL PAÍS in 2019 — during his visit to the San Sebastián Festival, where he accepted the Donostia Award and present the film A Masterpiece (directed by Giuseppe Capotondi) — he discussed not only cinema, but also climate change, the environment and his concerns for the future of the planet. “I have children and grandchildren, and we are going to leave them a world in which they will not be able to live. Some 2.5 million species of birds have disappeared, and the Chinese have been forced to pollinate plants by hand because of a shortage of insects. Is this the world we want? What the United Nations is doing with climate change is bullshit.”

His private life was complicated. His first wife was Lois May Hardwick. The two met when they were college students and married in 1959. They stayed together until 1966, when Sutherland got remarried to Shirley Douglas, the daughter of a famous Canadian politician. The marriage barely lasted four years, but the couple had two children, twins, Rachel and the well-known Kiefer, 57, who from a young age followed in his father’s footsteps, while trying to carve out his own path.

The two divorced when Kiefer was five, and the twins stayed with their mother in Toronto and Donald, after a two-year affair with Jane Fonda, remarried. Father and son starred in the same film. The youngster made his debut with the 1983 movie Max Dugan Returns, which his father also starred in, and they were back together in A Time to Kill, in 1996. But it wasn’t until the western Forsaken, in 2015, that they shared more scenes together, finally playing father and son. “Well, to say that there hasn’t been conflict between the two of us over the course of our relationship and in our lives would simply be false,” Kiefer, known for his role as Jack Bauer in the TV series 24, conceded in a 2016 interview with The Globe and Mail. “It did give us something to draw upon, absolutely.”

Sutherland found stability with his third wife, French-Canadian actress Francine Racette, whom he met while filming Alien Thunder. The two married in 1972 and had three sons: Rossif, Angus Redford and Roeg; all named after directors Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now) and Frederick Rossif, and actor Robert Redford. In a 2005 interview with The Guardian, Sutherland acknowledged that he had made some missteps throughout his life, both personally and professionally. “Everything was my fault. I was so dumb. But if I hadn’t made the mistakes I made, I wouldn’t have met the wonderful woman I’ve been married to for over 30 years, so I guess that makes the mistakes OK.”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition