The actor Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, had an unbeatable combination of personal and professional integrity.
Was Donald Sutherland a movie star? He didn’t look like one: A lanky 6’4,” with a curly mop of hair, a lantern jaw and slightly bulbous, iridescent eyes, he wastraditionally handsome. He didn’t play action heroes or lovesick swains. He was never even nominated for an Oscar. at 88, rose to movie fame at the dawn of the 1970s, when unconventional looks were in fashion, and he rode out the decade as a top-billed name.
There may be no better example of Sutherland’s undervalued commitment to emotional truth than “Ordinary People,” the 1980 best picture winner about a fragmenting suburban family. Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton and Judd Hirsch were all nominated for Oscars , but Sutherland’s performance as the quiet, heartsore father went unrewarded.
But 1970 also let Sutherland co-star as combat surgeon Hawkeye Pierce opposite Elliott Gould’s Trapper John McIntyre in the counterculture hit “M.A.S.H.,” and suddenly he was one of the few actors in movies who seemed to be telling the truth about the war and the world, and with a cynical idealism that made sense.
The films that followed are an essay in what kinds of movie should star an actor who doesn’t seem to be a star. “Klute” — Jane Fonda won the Oscar, while Sutherland was merely the movie’s unwavering conscience and backbone. “Don’t Look Now” remains one of the most unsettling films of its era, split evenly between the eros of its controversial sex scene and the catharsis of its shocking ending.
A dashing German spy in “Eye of the Needle” , a South African stirred to fight apartheid in “A Dry White Season” , Sutherland’s Emmy-winning role as a Soviet colonel seeking a serial killer in “Citizen X” , his wily track coach Bill Bowerman opposite Billy Crudup’s Steve Prefontaine in “Without Limits” — all memorable, rock-solid performances. And by the new millennium, Sutherland was ripe for discovery by a new generation of moviegoers, first as an adoring and adorable Mr.
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