Donald Sutherland: 10 Greatest Performances

Because Sutherland is primarily known for his dramatic performances, his breakthrough role in Robert Aldrich’s rousing war film is often overlooked. The young actor was in his early 30s when he landed the part of goofball Vernon Pinkley, one of the members of the titular ragtag squad of crooks and criminals recruited to fight for Uncle Sam. The shit-eating grin Sutherland brings to every scene — especially during a sequence when he’s tapped to pretend to be a stern general doing inspections — is one of this blockbuster’s best features, suggesting the potent spark he’d lend to roles going forward. But Sutherland would be even funnier in another combat flick very soon.

Robert Altman’s first masterpiece was infamous for the disagreements he had with his two stars, Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland. The duo played Trapper John McIntyre and Hawkeye Pierce, U.S. surgeons trying to stay sane while sewing up wounded bodies during the Korean War. Gould eventually mended fences with Altman, going on to make several films together, but for Sutherland the feud kept them from ever collaborating again. (“I think that, in hindsight, Donald and I were two elitist, arrogant actors who really weren’t getting Altman’s genius,” Gould later said.) Nonetheless, Sutherland is terrifically caustic as Trapper John’s partner in crime at work and off duty, endlessly cracking snide, wry jokes about the stupidity of the military and the senselessness of war. Sutherland once said that Alan Alda, who played the character on the long-running TV show., thanked him for giving him his career.

Jane Fonda won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of the troubled escort Bree Daniels, but this Alan J. Pakula thriller is very much a two-hander, chronicling the deepening relationship between Daniels and John Klute, the detective who tries to protect her from a mysterious serial killer. Klute caught Sutherland at his most steely: Typified by the character’s unfashionable haircut, his investigator is unbending and all-business, but he’ll slowly fall in love with this stormy beauty. Sutherland made competence and smarts deeply sexy, impressing Fonda, who wrote in her memoir My Life So Far, “I found his rangy, hangdog quality and droopy, pale blue eyes especially appealing. He also had something of the old-world gentleman about him.”

What does grief look like? As John Baxter, a husband in mourning after his daughter’s accidental drowning, Sutherland played that emotion with smothering obsession, creating one of cinema’s most haunted portrayals of loss. This horror-thriller benefits greatly from his heartbreaking turn, which registers as an unreachable emotional chasm from his wife Laura (Julie Christie) and a broken spirit that will probably never be repaired. Sutherland has two moments of anguish that bookend Don’t Look Now and define this chillingly beautiful film: his pained slow-motion cries as John pulls his dead daughter’s body out of the water and, at the finale, the terrified look as he discovers that his little girl is never coming back to him — and that his fate is sealed.

Filmed over a couple days during the midst of shooting Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Sutherland’s cameo in this college-comedy classic came about because of John Landis. The star had liked the young man who was an assistant director on Sutherland’s 1970 film Kelly’s Heroes that he agreed to do small parts in Landis’ future features. In Animal House, that meant playing the world’s coolest English professor, Dave Jennings, who smokes pot, gets laid and admits that, yeah, Milton is pretty boring. Sutherland’s only regret? Not taking Landis up on his offer for two percent of the profits, accepting a measly day rate instead.

Now immortalized on social media because of the memed-to-death still of Sutherland’s shocked pointing, this remake of the 1956 flick is a still-potent horror film about aliens who resemble humans lurking within our midst. “One night during filming, [director] Phil [Kaufman] asked me: ‘Do you know what this film is about?’ … And he just said: ‘McDonalds,’” Sutherland later told Rolling Stone. “I mean, that’s why I did it in basically one word. It was that sense of everything feeling like it was being homogenized to death at the end of the Seventies.” As a public health inspector who eventually comes to realize the menace in his midst, Sutherland personified the paranoia of an era in which we didn’t have to worry about extra-terrestrials — the Cold War and white-picket-fence conformity would get us first.

This Best Picture-winner contains a bevy of tremendous performances, but the one standout who wasn’t Oscar-nominated was Sutherland. That’s a testament to his magnificently understated turn as a grieving father now permanently walking on emotional eggshells after the suicide of his son — all he can do is try to serve as some sort of clumsy mediator between his raging wife (Mary Tyler Moore) and their shattered other son (Timothy Hutton). It’s a portrait of gentle masculinity — of trying to be strong while you’re falling apart inside — that will blindside new viewers who aren’t prepared for its quiet power.

It’s just one scene — but what a scene it is. As Mr. X, a shadowy man with important intel regarding what really went down when President Kennedy was assassinated, Sutherland embodied the romantic ideal of the deep-state informant — the man who knows where the bodies are buried and has seen too much. Director Oliver Stone had initially considered Marlon Brando for the part, but later said, “I was lucky to get Sutherland because he’s a fast actor. And he was great.” Juiced by John Williams’ jittery score, Sutherland’s seductive exposition pushes JFK into a whole other realm of electric paranoia. Mr. X is barely in this three-hour film, but you never forget him after he leaves the screen.

Director Fred Schepisi had a clear vision of how he saw Flan Kittredge, the posh New York art dealer who would be played by Sutherland in the big-screen adaptation of the John Guare play. “Fred said, ‘He’s like a used car salesman,’” recalled Sutherland, who amplified the character’s oily charm and faux grandiosity — which makes him the perfect target for Will Smith’s sly scam artist. There’s real contempt in Sutherland’s portrayal, condemning the sorts of people who make money off of other people’s creativity while contributing little to society themselves — and getting rich and complacent in the process. Long before our modern takedowns of the one-percent in Succession and Knives Out, Sutherland had this kind of culture-vulture parasite in his sights.

Late in life, Sutherland enjoyed arguably his greatest commercial success playing the evil President Coriolanus Snow, who rules the Hunger Games with an amused detachment. Some movie villains rant and rave, but this veteran actor went the opposite direction, portraying a man confident in his power and unconcerned by the revolutionary rhetoric of Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen. Where other veteran actors would slum it in a special-effects blockbuster, Sutherland radiated subtle menace, lending the burgeoning franchise a dash of class, wit and gravitas. He was a pro no matter the assignment.