10 Essential Donald Sutherland Performances
The New Hollywood icon was an unusually grounded movie star.
News of Donald Sutherland’s death last week at the age of 88 has inspired a lot of glowing tributes. Co-stars, friends, critics: It feels like just about everyone has something complimentary to say about the sharp, lanky Canadian actor, who became an unusually grounded movie star during the New Hollywood era of the 1970s and then just kept making films thereafter. Truthfully, there’s something especially bittersweet about these eulogies and not just because it’s always sad when an artist of his caliber leaves us. To see people shower Sutherland with posthumous praise is to wonder why he didn’t hear more of it during his actual lifetime — why awards groups didn’t take more notice of his work, why he seemed to go long stretches without landing a role worthy of his talent. Where was the love for this great film actor all along?
In all fairness, Sutherland may have been perfectly pleased with the career he built for himself over six decades. He worked constantly, never taking more than a year or so off between projects. And though Oscar glory was never fully his reward, the performances themselves painted a picture of a Hollywood mainstay who rarely, if ever, phoned it in. Part of the joy of Sutherland’s work was that he was usually engaging (and engaged!) even when the movie itself wasn’t; a consummate pro improving good and bad films alike. If Sutherland appeared onscreen, you were usually guaranteed at least a few minutes of lively — or strategically subdued — acting. He’s excellent, for just one example, in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, which is otherwise regarded as a dopey dry run to the series.
In fact, the sheer size of Sutherland’s filmography makes compiling a list of his greatest performances a tricky proposition. Without a full IMDb-credit marathon, there’s no way to be sure you’ve caught every contender. The list below is likely as informed by the blind spots it doesn’t acknowledge as the consensus favorites it does; no one who’s seen a healthy number of Sutherland’s most acclaimed movies will be surprised by the selections, which are disproportionately drawn from his most popular era (the ’70s, of course) with a handful of powerful showings from later years filling out the rest. Consider this a jumping-off point more than a last word. Donald Sutherland may be gone, but only the most exhaustive fans can say that their journey through his filmography is anything close to complete.
M*A*S*H (1970)
A star is born, one prank and quip and sawed-off leg at a time. After cracking wise with the Dirty Dozen, a 30-something Donald Sutherland rose through the military-movie ranks to play irreverent Army doctor “Hawkeye” Pierce in Robert Altman’s grunts-will-be-grunts Korean War satire. M*A*S*H can be a tough sit today — not just for its graphic surgery scenes but for the sexist, downright sadistic abuse our horndog “heroes” heap on a female superior. But there’s no denying Sutherland’s nascent leading-man magnetism, which takes the form here of an insult-comic assault on the chain of command. He gets a legendary entrance: rounding a corner to triumphant marching music, his swagger a sarcastic rebuttal to the pomp and circumstance of a General MacArthur quote scrolling down the left side of the frame, before he promptly steals a jeep and zooms into the action proper. Star-making though the performance was, it was quickly overshadowed by a different actor in the very same role: How many people now think of Alan Alda, from the tamer TV version of M*A*S*H, when they hear the name Hawkeye?
Klute (1971)
Possibly to avoid being typecast forever as a jocular jokester, Sutherland chased his breakout performance in M*A*S*H with a character who was nearly the polar opposite in temperament: a repressed, humorless, taciturn private detective scouring New York City for clues to what happened to a missing friend. Though he’s the title character of Alan J. Pakula’s quintessential ’70s thriller, John Klute is not really the central figure of Klute; the movie belongs more to the tough, wary call girl Bree Daniel, played by a deservedly Oscar-winning Jane Fonda. But there’s a wealth of psychological mystery in Sutherland’s unshowy, uninflected turn. He does most of his acting here through his searching eyes — a particularly apropos skill set for a film that’s all about the male gaze in its many insidious forms. Is Klute a better man than the abusive johns and pimps in Bree’s life or just more timidly possessive? Sutherland keeps us guessing, while establishing one of the more heartening qualities of his career: a general disinterest in hogging the spotlight and a willingness to cede it to his female co-stars.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
One of the great art-horror shockers of the 1970s begins with a howl of anguish — the bottomless despair that swallows Sutherland’s John Baxter when he discovers the drowned body of his daughter. But after those harrowing opening minutes, Don’t Look Now becomes a portrait of emotions deliberately deferred, as Baxter’s unresolved grief metastasizes into a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom during an ill-fated trip to Venice. As in Klute, Sutherland beautifully withholds, turning what’s going on in Baxter’s heart and mind into a puzzle we want to piece together. This was also the movie that confirmed the actor as a new kind of shaggy, unvarnished Hollywood sex symbol; his love scene with Julie Christie is so raw and passionate, rumors that it was decidedly unsimulated have persisted for decades. And would the all-time surrealist jolt of an ending work without Sutherland’s befuddled reaction, that impotent “Wait …” he repeatedly utters as his world splinters into phantasmagorical violence and awful realization?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
And you thought the ending of Don’t Look Now was blood-curdling. Invasion’s meme’d final seconds wouldn’t be half as nightmarish without the wealth of feeling Sutherland pumps through this masterful remake. His performance as a Bay Area health inspector trying to outrun an extraterrestrial conspiracy is among his richest; you can track the whole arc of the movie across his changing expressions, from the growing romantic affection for a close friend (Brooke Adams) to the bone-deep revulsion expressed when the future literally crumbles in his arms. By the late ’70s, Sutherland was already a countercultural icon, which only strengthens the subtext of this Invasion — the sense that director Philip Kaufman was exploring the podification of the whole baby-boom generation. But what Sutherland really brings to the role is a range of emotion, the full agony and ecstasy of humanity. Watching him, we know what we stand to lose if the bodysnatchers win.
Ordinary People (1980)
Somehow, Sutherland was never nominated for an Academy Award. No, not even for Ordinary People, which not only won Best Picture but also scored acting nods for co-stars Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, and a young Timothy Hutton (who ultimately took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). It’s not so hard to understand the snub. Sutherland, after all, delivers a typically restrained and non-declarative performance in Robert Redford’s autumnal drama about a suburban Illinois family coming unraveled after the death of its eldest son. As bereaved patriarch Calvin Jarrett, the actor sends small ripples of sadness across his smiling, peacekeeping façade, offering a tender portrait of a man trying to cling to the delusion that his relationships can be restored to what they were before tragedy struck. Though he has only one big scene — a climactic confrontation with Moore — his heartbreak is the heartbeat of the movie. Pity it was too soft and subtle for the Academy to hear. (Sutherland was, finally, awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2017, “for a lifetime of indelible characters, rendered with unwavering truthfulness.”)
Backdraft (1991)
What a feast Sutherland could make of a tiny role. Look at the hip professor he briefly but memorably portrayed in Animal House (a spiritual sequel to M*A*S*H, for better or worse) or his five electrifying minutes in JFK, putting some real flavor on a glorified exposition dump. But the epitome of his ability to do a hell of a lot with only a little might be his juicy, villainous cameo in Ron Howard’s overblown ’90s thriller Backdraft. Sutherland does the absolute most with his two scenes as an infamous, imprisoned arsonist the good guys approach after a new firebug starts lighting up Chicago. When Robert De Niro’s veteran firefighter provokes the psychopath during a parole hearing, Sutherland’s confession of desire is chillingly, obscenely joyful — the spectacle of a madman unable to contain his lusty appetite for destruction. Arriving just a few months after Silence of the Lambs, these scenes are like a transmission from a reality where Sutherland got cast as Hannibal Lecter instead of Anthony Hopkins. He could have made quite the sinful meal out of that part, too.
Six Degrees of Separation (1993)
For all the years Sutherland spent playing hippies and scruffy oddballs (including, yes, a guy nicknamed Oddball), he was equally comfortable slipping into the manners and mores of high society. He’s perfect, for example, in this adaptation of John Guare’s hit New York stage play about a wealthy, liberal Manhattan couple regaled by a code-switching con man (a young Will Smith, before he was a movie star). Sutherland skillfully highlights the pretensions and blindspots of Flanders “Flan” Kittredge, a private art dealer all too vulnerable to words that flatter his worldview. At the same time, he also steers the character away from a mere eat-the-rich caricature and makes him a gregarious, engaging storyteller in his own right. In doing so, Sutherland deepens the moral architecture of this adaptation, a class drama more withering if the audience can see a little of themselves in the targets of its critique. Plus, it’s just a blast to watch the veteran performer dig his teeth into witty, theatrical dialogue, especially with Stockard Channing — who plays Flan’s socialite wife, Ouisa — as his steady scene partner.
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
Thank goodness Joe Wright didn’t listen when Sutherland insisted that he was all wrong for the role of Mr. Bennet, the comically wearied but affectionate girl dad of the director’s hit Jane Austen adaptation starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. More than any project before it, Pride & Prejudice took advantage of the actor’s oft-suppressed warmth, which will sometimes peek through the cracks in his characters’ severity and intelligence. His touching, amused performance here is like the sunny flip side to the grieving fathers he played much earlier in his career, a Calvin Jarrett with his family (and happiness) intact. Though the American cut ends with some romantic canoodling, per the demands of distributors, the version released in the U.K. gives Sutherland the last word via a blessing. “I cannot believe that anyone can deserve you, but it seems I am overruled,” he declares through tears of surprised joy. His outpouring of emotion is catching.
The Hunger Games (2012)
There are plenty of younger viewers who probably know Sutherland only as President Coriolanus Snow. That would be more depressing if the Hunger Games movies didn’t put his talents to such good use. Plenty of actors might go giddily over the top if cast as the despotic leader of a dystopian society that pits children against each other in a televised death match. The fun of Sutherland’s performance — which only gets better and better as the series progresses across its four entries — is how he relishes Snow’s insinuations and threats without raising his voice above a calm murmur. As appalling tyrants go, he’s rather seductively soft-spoken, with a dark wit that enlivens the repetitive YA mechanics of Suzanne Collins’s plotting. He also gets a great final scene, bellowing with delighted laughter in the face of inevitable mob justice. Sutherland’s body of work goes much deeper than The Hunger Games, but it was still a pleasure to see him brighten/darken the corners of a giant Hollywood franchise and presumably get paid well to do so.
The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019)
Every once in a while, an actor stumbles into an accidental swan song, a movie that perfectly functions as a punctuation on their whole career. Though Sutherland would appear in a few more films before his death last week (including Ad Astra, which has a valedictory quality, too), The Burnt Orange Heresy provides that unlikely sense of closure. In this whip-smart thriller, he plays an aging, reclusive painter rumored to be safeguarding work never seen by the outside world — a situation that inspires a very low-key attempt at a heist. Eyes twinkling with mischief, Sutherland wanders through the movie like the legend he was, savoring screenwriter Scott Smith’s playful dialogue. His character, Jerome Debney, has nothing left to prove to anyone, and the same could maybe be said of Sutherland himself at that point in his life. Heresy feeds heavily off his star power, utilizing it as a proxy for the celebrity of a gallery-world giant. It’s a pleasure just to bask in his genial, undiminished charm, especially now that we’ve really seen the last of it.
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