Rome, 20 June 2024 – Fascinating and ambiguous, reassuring or disturbing.Donald Sutherlandpassed away ad 88 years old after one long illness, he managed in a very long career to interpret the most diverse roles. Evil, cynical, or even very tender as in “Ella & John”, one of Paolo Virzì’s most recent films. He had received in 2018 an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, and had his own star on the Walk of Fame. You had also worked a lot with Italian cinema, as well as with international cinema: with Federico Fellini in “Casanova”, with Bernardo Bertolucci in “Novecento”, up to Renzo Martinelli in “Piazza delle cinque lune”. An elongated face, a blue gaze, almost transparent. The smile is always a little mocking, almost always a polite beard framing his face.
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As a boy, in Canada where he grew up, he once asked his mother if he was handsome, only to be told “no, but your face has a lot of character.” Not handsome, but with a lot of character, Donald Sutherland ended up playing almost two hundred films, from the early 1960s until yesterday. Robert Altman gave him one of his first big roles in “M*A*S*H”Oliver Stone wanted it for “JFK”. Every time, Sutherland said, “Working with those directors was like falling in love. I was their lover, their beloved.”
One of the first films with which he came to international attention “The Dirty Dozen” by Robert Aldrich, from 1967, set during the Second World War. As in the best legends, everything was born almost by chance. An actor’s defection, and “Hey! You with the big ears! You do that role,” the director shouted at him. Since then he has worked tirelessly: from “A Call Girl for Inspector Klute” in 1971, in which he is a policeman who meets a prostitute played by Jane Fonda – with whom, off the set, he began a three-year relationship – up to in the end. He plays a fascist in “Novecento” by Bernardo Bertolucci, he is Lothario in “Casanova” by Federico Fellini, from 1976. But he also accompanies Robert Redford’s directorial debut in “Ordinary People” from 1980, and is part of the wild cast of “ Animal House” from 1978, by John Landis. He will always speak about Fellini with emotional and enthusiastic tones: “Working for Fellini was the best experience of my life. For an actor, there is no one like him. More than anyone else in the world, you submit to Fellini. He is the master, and you go to serve.” He was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, a coastal town in Canada. His adolescence was peppered with health problems, including bouts of polio, which left him with one leg shorter than the other. His health will not assist him even later: in 1970, he fell ill with spinal meningitis, risking his life. He finished his studies at the University of Toronto, in English Literature. But soon after, the demon of acting takes him to London, to the Academy of Dramatic Art. Then the touring companies in the English theatres, British television, and finally the cinema. One of his very first films is “The Castle of the Living Dead” from 1974, with Christopher Lee and Philippe Leroy, directed by the Italian American Warren Kiefer, aka Lorenzo Sabbatini. Curiously, Donald Sutherland remembered that director when he baptized his son, whose name is Kiefer Sutherland, actor and musician. It was he who announced the death of his father yesterday.
