Donald Sutherland, a Canadian screen icon who enriched both Hollywood and his home country

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If an actor lives long enough, he’s sure to get stuck in a project of dubious artistic and commercial quality that might not make the top line of their obituary. But even when Canadian icon Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday in Miami at the age 88, appeared in some questionable productions – the 2020 zombie flick Alone, the 2012 espionage-on-a-budget thriller Assassin’s Bullet, and too many more to list here – the silver-tongued actor brought a magnificent dignity and committed professionalism to his surroundings.

Obituary: Donald Sutherland was cinema’s Canadian chameleon

Seeing Donald Sutherland’s name pop up in the opening credits was a kind of implicit promise from the producers to the audience: You are in good, sturdy hands. And when the actual writing and director and co-stars and resources of a film actually matched Sutherland’s high-tier talents? When those surrounding the star brought their very best game to go toe-to-toe with one of the most screen-ready performers of his generation? Then the results were remarkable, culture-shaking events.

Across more than 125 productions, Sutherland’s career came to define modern cinema. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, John Landis’s Animal House, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. It is a filmography so medium-altering to make you dizzy with envy and respect. And those are just highlights from two of his seven decades on screen. When all the elements lined up in Sutherland’s filmography, the movies – and the audiences – were changed forever.

“I personally think he was one of the most important actors in the history of film,” Sutherland’s son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, wrote in a statement Thursday noting his father’s death. This is not merely a common case of the bereaved family reaching for hyperbole, either: For so many years, Donald Sutherland was the wondrously slick oil that kept the entertainment machine moving.

Born in Saint John, N.B., in 1935, Sutherland’s first foray into the world of media was when he snagged a part-time job as a correspondent for a local radio station at the precocious age of just 14. Soon enough, he would move onto balancing career ambitions in both engineering and drama, eventually favouring the latter by heading to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1957.

A high-energy series of parts in Hammer horror films and British television, including a pair of appearances on the popular spy series The Avengers and The Saint, led to Sutherland being recruited for Robert Aldrich’s incendiary thriller The Dirty Dozen, which in 1967 would significantly shake the Hollywood system to its core. The film’s success punted Sutherland to Hollywood, where in the two decades that followed the actor would use the twin powers of his hammer-wrapped-in-silk voice and spirited-yet-haunting eyes to power a wild string of cinematic milestones.

From M*A*S*H to Hunger Games: Here are 5 great Donald Sutherland movies to watch in memory of the late actor

As a performer, he seemed to strike gold with an almost supernatural regularity. If you were so cruel as to scratch three-quarters of his screen work from the record, you would still be left with enough out-and-out masterpieces to power an entire wing of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences museum.

Take Sutherland’s gleefully mischievous professor in Animal House, both boldly representative of and sneakily subverting the academics who moulded a generation. His pioneering work as a father and husband ripped apart by grief in Don’t Look Now lives rent-free in the heads of so many contemporary filmmakers, actors and moviegoers who have turned the loose theme of “trauma” into its own burgeoning genre. No one can or should forget his commitment to give his body and soul over to the European masters of cinema, in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and Federico Fellini’s Casanova.

And this is all before Sutherland embraced what would become his sincerely sinister era, playing villains so engaging that you couldn’t help but end up siding with them just a little. Consider his friendly spook in Oliver Stone’s JFK – no other performer could have delivered such a ridiculously paranoid monologue of conspiratorial Coles Notes and make them sound even slightly plausible. He could shoot a stare as cold as ice, directly piercing audiences’ hearts, such as in Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak, an excellent experiment in fear-mongering. And he managed to reach into the nightmares of an entirely new generation with his performance as the cruel fascist manipulating the gladiatorial contests of The Hunger Games.

Yet as much as Sutherland committed himself to playing within the Hollywood studio system, he also constantly felt the pull toward his home country.

For starters, the actor famously held on to his Canadian citizenship against all expectations of his made-in-the-U.S.A. success story.

“They ask me at the border why I don’t take American citizenship. I could still be Canadian, they say. You could have dual citizenship. But I say: No, I’m not dual anything. I’m Canadian,” Sutherland once wrote in The Globe and Mail. “There’s a maple leaf in my underwear somewhere. There used to be a beaver there, too, but I’m 80 now and beavers are known to take off when you’re in your 80s.”

It was a mentality and spirit that Sutherland doubled down on when it came to his career. Across dozens of films and television series, he made it known that he was here to support the Canadian industry just as much as the one to our south. His performances in Murder By Decree, Threshold, Forsaken (alongside Kiefer) and even in the moving 1987 National Film Board documentary Give Me Your Answer True revealed an artist and storyteller who could never, and would never, forget the country he came from. For goodness sake, he even played Canadian hero Norman Bethune not once, but twice.

While the actor certainly cherished the acclaim and attention his Hollywood work delivered, he also seemed to use his many deserved opportunities to act as a cultural ambassador of sorts for Canada. With his piercing, prairie-sky blue eyes, his subtle and dignified command of a room and his gentle purr, Sutherland maintained the picture of a dignified, curious, cut-your-heart-and-it-bleeds-maple-syrup Canadian hero. Not for nothing was Sutherland immortalized on a Canadian stamp. Signed, sealed, delivered – he’s ours.