Donald Sutherland, the celebrated and prolific actor who appeared in innumerable popular films over the course of his five-decade career, passed away at the age of 88.
Sutherland’s career included early breakout parts in The Dirty Dozen and MASH, Oscar wins like Klute and Ordinary People, and his evil role in the Hunger Games saga.
The Emmy Award winner passed away at home in Miami today after a protracted illness, his agency CAA confirmed to Deadline.
Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in New Brunswick, Canada, and later moved to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Throughout his childhood, he faced major ailments such as polio, rheumatic fever, and spinal meningitis.
He left Canada to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and quickly found work in television and low-budget films.
He made his Hollywood debut in the iconic war film The Dirty Dozen, which costarred Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine, and Jim Brown. It was the seventh highest-grossing film in 1967.
After leaving London for Hollywood, Sutherland secured one of his most memorable parts in the 1970 anti-war comedy-drama MASH, as “Hawkeye” Pierce. MASH was one of the decade’s most successful films and is widely considered as a classic.
Sutherland was a Hollywood leading man during the 1970s, appearing in films such as the Oscar-winning Klute, with Jane Fonda, the psychological horror Don’t Look Now, and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also appeared in the popular comedy Animal House.
He starred in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980), which received the Academy Award for Best Picture. Other notable films include Backdraft, JFK, Six Degrees of Separation, The Italian Job, and Pride and Prejudice.
Sutherland was equally successful in television, receiving an Emmy Award for Citizen X in 1995 and a Golden Globe for Path to War.
Sutherland was exposed to a younger generation of moviegoers with the hit dystopian blockbuster series The Hunger Games, in which he played the evil President Coriolanus Snow.
Though he never garnered an Oscar nomination, he did win an Academy Honorary Award in 2017 “for a lifetime of indelible characters, rendered with unwavering truthfulness.” He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011 and the Canadian Walk of Fame in 2000.
Sutherland was married three times, the last being to actress Francine Racette, whom was married for 52 years before his ?????. He was previously married to Lois May Hardwick and Shirley Douglas, and he had an affair with his Klute co-star, Jane Fonda.
He had five children, the most well-known of them was his son Kiefer Sutherland, who played Jack Bauer in the television series 24.
“I was too young to go watch my father’s films in the cinema,” Kiefer Sutherland told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “By the time I was 20, VHS was accessible, and a friend of my father’s had a large collection of his films. In three days, I saw Don’t Look Know, Klute, M*A*S*H, Kelly’s Heroes, 1900, and Fellini’s Casanova.
“It was such a wide spectrum of characters, and I remember calling him up and I felt really badly that I grew up not knowing what a profoundly special actor he was, I felt horribly guilty of that. As a young actor, I had never known or seen another actor who’ve done characters so diverse either.”
