{"id":265176,"date":"2024-06-24T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-06-24T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=265176"},"modified":"2024-06-23T08:11:18","modified_gmt":"2024-06-23T07:11:18","slug":"rip-donald-sutherland-17-jul-1935-20-jun-2024-hollywood-legend-dead-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/06\/rip-donald-sutherland-17-jul-1935-20-jun-2024-hollywood-legend-dead-at-88\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP Donald Sutherland (17 Jul 1935 \u2013 20 Jun 2024): Hollywood Legend Dead at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_265177\" style=\"width: 460px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Donald-Sutherland.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-265177\" class=\"wp-image-265177\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Donald-Sutherland.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"450\" height=\"299\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Donald-Sutherland.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Donald-Sutherland-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/Donald-Sutherland-768x511.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 450px) 100vw, 450px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-265177\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Actor Donald Sutherland arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere of &#8216;The Hunger Games: Catching Fire&#8217; at Nokia Theater on 18 Nov 2013.<br \/>(Photo by Axelle\/Bauer-Griffin\/FilmMagic)<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"po-hr-cn__dek\"><em>Donald Sutherland (1935\u20132024) projected equal parts warmth, intelligence, and menace on the big screen. But he wasn\u2019t just a brilliant actor \u2014 he was a man of the Left who never abandoned those values.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>21 Jun 2024 <\/em>&#8211; There are some actors you can\u2019t help loving. Not many, but the late Donald Sutherland was definitely one.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"sr-at__slot sr-at__slot--left prt-x\"><\/aside>\n<p>Just to see that narrow, bony face onscreen \u2014 with the long Stan Laurel chin and the big ears and the pale blue eyes that could be kindly or crazy, warm or cold, humorous or sinister \u2014 was to feel better at the movies. His presence alone helped me get through <em>The Hunger Games.<\/em> It was a pleasure to watch an old pro like him delicately snipping roses in the garden and exuding restrained, intellectual menace as the American dictator-president Coriolanus Snow. And it was touching to read that <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/film\/2013\/nov\/19\/donald-sutherland-hunger-games-catching-fire\" >he hoped<\/a> the very popular <em>Hunger Games<\/em> and its sequels might help spark a political youth movement to confront the dire state of the nation. It wasn\u2019t so far-fetched an idea to an actor who\u2019d been young and politically engaged when there was still a belief that film movements such as Third Cinema and more mainstream cycles of political modernism could play an important role in revolutionary struggle.<\/p>\n<p>Sutherland wasn\u2019t just a great actor, always interesting even in mediocre crap; he was one of ours, a lefty, with a period of intense anti\u2013Vietnam War organizing to his credit. In the early 1970s, the start of the defining ten years of his stardom, he toured with <em>Klute<\/em> costar Jane Fonda in a traveling roadshow called FTA (Fuck the Army), which put them on the national security radar for years to come. FTA was a profane alternative to Bob Hope\u2019s long-running USO show, meant to counter the <em>rah-rah<\/em> patriotism of the conservative Hope and his old-fashioned entertainment.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_209933\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-209933\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/images.jacobinmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/21151243\/donald-sutherland-5-6ca86113378446c2ba76390c4b3f8a12.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-209933\" src=\"https:\/\/images.jacobinmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/21151243\/donald-sutherland-5-6ca86113378446c2ba76390c4b3f8a12-900x600.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"600\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-209933\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from <cite>The Hunger Games<\/cite>. (Lionsgate)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A documentary about the FTA group <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=f4haIO-YB5Y\" >shows<\/a> Sutherland reading from Dalton Trumbo\u2019s harrowing antiwar book <em>Johnny Got His Gun<\/em>, which was made into a 1971 movie featuring Sutherland. Sutherland kept the faith after the counterculture struggle of the 1970s faded. He played the role of crusading Canadian communist Dr Norman Bethune twice, in <em>Bethune <\/em>(1977) and <em>Bethune: The Making of a Hero<\/em> (1990), both films celebrating this advocate for socialized medicine who served as a combat surgeon on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"sr-at__slot sr-at__slot--left prt-x\"><\/aside>\n<p>But of course, most of us know Sutherland from his marvelous performances in mainstream films, especially <em>M*A*S*H<\/em> (1970), <em>Klute <\/em>(1971), <em>Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em> (1972), <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em> (1978), and <em>Ordinary People<\/em> (1980). It\u2019s hard to describe the effect of Sutherland\u2019s performances overall, as he was so able to sink into his roles you could hardly ever catch him \u201cacting.\u201d A kind of hangdog intelligence is central to his star power \u2014 which seems an odd term to use in his case, though it was possible to be a big star in the 1970s with idiosyncratic, hard-to-define qualities as your main appeal. He was somehow beautiful to look at though he was a collection of physical oddities and contradictions \u2014 that impressive baritone emerging from a long, thin, unglamorous frame; that almost devilish swoop of his eyebrows countered by the sweetest smile.<\/p>\n<p>Becoming an actor in Scottish theater after giving up his university training to be an engineer, Sutherland first came to widespread prominence in Robert Aldrich\u2019s <em>The Dirty Dozen<\/em> (1967), about twelve military convicts recruited to pull off a suicide mission against the Nazis in WWII, bringing his offbeat charm to the lanky goofball Vernon Pinkley. Robert Altman saw his performance and regarded it as an aptly irreverent audition for the lead role of wry prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in <em>M*A*S*H<\/em> (1970).<\/p>\n<p>Sutherland conveyed a kind of unlikely grit and could pull off heroics in a way that took all the triteness out of demonstrations of courage and determination. As the health inspector hero of Philip Kaufman\u2019s <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em>, he defines his character\u2019s implacable nerve by the underlying delight he takes in confronting a French restaurateur trying to pass off rat turds as capers in a soup by holding up the unidentified object and barking, \u201cIf it\u2019s a caper, then <em>eat it<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s something inspired about the way a scene like that can set you up for his character\u2019s dogged struggle to escape the pod-people overrunning San Francisco, including scenes of rescuing the woman he loves (Brooke Adams) by breaking into her home and eluding her already-podded boyfriend by carrying her bodily out of the building. Despite his unconventional looks, you don\u2019t doubt this guy would be the last man standing. And his pod-person takeover at the end, the famous much-memed moment when he points and screeches at a former friend is still so powerful because Sutherland made this character a kind of ultimate, incorruptible individual.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_209934\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-209934\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/images.jacobinmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/21151333\/kqH43i8Wud3hE5jqY3wGjGr5LY2XKANmozNMBfYt.jpg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-209934\" src=\"https:\/\/images.jacobinmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/21151333\/kqH43i8Wud3hE5jqY3wGjGr5LY2XKANmozNMBfYt-900x506.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"506\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-209934\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Still from <cite>Don\u2019t Look Now<\/cite>. (Paramount Pictures)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>His earlier scenes with Adams show Sutherland\u2019s amazing attractiveness as a romantic lead. They\u2019re supposed to be friends and work colleagues, but the way he leans just slightly in toward her when they stand together joking around, and infuses his grins with tenderness, conveys his unspoken love for her without sentimentality or clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"sr-at__slot sr-at__slot--left prt-x\"><\/aside>\n<p>He\u2019s a very loving actor, Sutherland \u2014 he does affection extremely well. And it\u2019s strange to realize how sexy he was, though the famously erotic scenes in <em>Don\u2019t Look Now<\/em> and <em>Klute <\/em>are there to attest to this stealthy power of Sutherland\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>And given all this power, it\u2019s surprising to read Sutherland\u2019s own account of his essential nervousness as an actor that\u2019s made him throw up before starting in almost any role, as he attests in a <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.interviewmagazine.com\/film\/hugh-grant-and-donald-sutherland-enjoy-a-perfectly-dreadful-conversation\" >freewheeling exchange<\/a> with Hugh Grant in <em>Interview<\/em> magazine:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>SUTHERLAND: I\u2019m nervous all the time. For me, the camera\u2019s either a voyeur or a lover. If it\u2019s your lover, it shares your soul. . . . If it\u2019s a voyeur, it\u2019s a fucking paparazzi.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>GRANT: I know that Anthony Hopkins goes and strokes the camera every morning and says \u201cGood morning\u201d to it.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>SUTHERLAND: I kiss the lens.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sutherland then goes on to make Grant write down an Alexander Pope quote he feels describes him perfectly: \u201cTrue wit is nature to advantage dressed, what oft was thought but ne\u2019er so well expressed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a late-life <em>Esquire<\/em> magazine <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esquire.com\/entertainment\/interviews\/a9379\/donald-sutherland-quotes-0311\/\" >piece<\/a>, Sutherland contributed a series of statements about what he\u2019d learned by his mid-seventies. The last ones are moving in the context of Sutherland\u2019s death at age eighty-eight, and convey again those qualities that seemed inherently part of him onscreen. On the subject of death, he wrote with a kind of cool, cerebral insistence on looking at the reality of it:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The spirit of mankind\u00a0is not going to help me through my death. My death is a lonely little journey that I\u2019ll take myself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And then he concluded with life-loving warmth:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You know\u00a0Dalton Trumbo? He wrote\u00a0<em>Johnny Got His Gun.<\/em> He was one of the blacklisted writers. Spent time in prison. Lost everything. Got everything back. Wonderful fellow. The last thing he said to me was \u201cDon\u2019t forget to be happy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So Sutherland\u2019s gone on his lonely little journey, but it seems like he didn\u2019t forget to be happy.<\/p>\n<p>______________________________________________<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>Eileen Jones is a film critic at <\/em>Jacobin<em>, host of the <\/em>Filmsuck <em>podcast, and author of <\/em>Filmsuck, USA.<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2024\/06\/donald-sutherland-actor-hollywood-obituary\" >Go to Original &#8211; jacobin.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>21 Jun 2024 &#8211; There are some actors you can\u2019t help loving. Donald Sutherland was definitely one. He projected warmth, intelligence and menace on the big screen but wasn\u2019t just a brilliant actor \u2014 he was a man of the Left who never abandoned those values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":265177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[915,2678,3333,2623,1731,1142],"class_list":["post-265176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-art","tag-cinema","tag-donald-sutherland","tag-hollywood","tag-left-politics","tag-obituary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265178,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265176\/revisions\/265178"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}