Donald Sutherland, “MASH” star, dies at age 88 – NBC Chicago

Donald Sutherland, the successful film and television actor whose career spanned from “MASH” to “The Hunger Games,” has died. He was 88 years old.

Kiefer Sutherland, the actor’s son, confirmed the news of his father’s death on Thursday. Further details were not immediately known.

“I personally consider him to be one of the greatest actors in film history,” said Kiefer Sutherland in “X.” “He was never discouraged by a role, whether it was good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and you can never ask for more than that.”

The tall, gaunt Canadian actor with a grin that could be sweet or devilish was known for unusual characters such as Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s “MASH,” the hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” and the stoned professor in “I Think I’m Being Kicked by a Horse.”

Before embarking on a long career as a respected character actor, Sutherland embodied the unpredictable, anti-establishment cinema of the 1970s.

Over the decades, Sutherland showed his versatility in more subdued – but still eccentric – roles in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary Family” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” Most recently, he starred in the “Hunger Games” films. He never gave up and worked regularly until his death. His memoirs, “Made Up, But Still True,” are due to be published in November.

“I love to work. I love to work passionately,” Sutherland told Charlie Rose in 1998. “I love to feel my hand fit into another character’s glove. I feel an enormous freedom – time stands still for me. I’m not as crazy as I used to be, but I’m still a little crazy.”

Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in St. John, New Brunswick, the son of a salesman and a math teacher. He grew up in Nova Scotia and was a disc jockey with his own radio station at age 14.

“When I was 13 or 14, I really thought that everything I felt was wrong and dangerous and that God was going to kill me for it,” Sutherland told the New York Times in 1981. “My father always said, ‘Shut up, Donnie, and maybe people will think you have character.'”

Sutherland began as an engineering student at the University of Toronto, but then switched to English and began acting in school theater productions. While studying in Toronto, he met Lois Hardwick, an aspiring actress. They married in 1959, but divorced seven years later.

After graduating in 1956, Sutherland attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to study acting. Sutherland began appearing in plays in the West End and on British television. After a move to Los Angeles, he continued to act until a series of war films changed his career path.

His first American film was “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played the psychopathic police officer Vernon Pinkley. In 1970, the World War II film “Kelly’s Heroes” and “MASH” were both released, a huge success that made Sutherland a star.

“Character roles are more challenging,” Sutherland told the Washington Post in 1970. “They are permanent. A good character actor can show a different face in every film without boring the audience.”

If it had been up to Sutherland, Altman would have been fired from MASH. He and his co-star Elliott Gould were unhappy with the director’s unorthodox, improvisational style and fought for his replacement. But the film was a bigger success than expected and Sutherland personally identified with its anti-war message.

Sutherland, actress Jane Fonda and others spoke out openly against the Vietnam War and founded the Free Theater Associates in 1971. Although banned by the Army for their political views, they began performing near military bases in Southeast Asia in 1973.

Sutherland’s career as a leading actor peaked in the 1970s, when he starred in films by the greatest directors of the day – even if they didn’t always do their best work with him. Sutherland, who often said he saw himself as serving a director’s vision, worked with Federico Fellini (1976’s “Fellini’s Casanova”), Bernardo Bertolucci (1976’s “1900”), Claude Chabrol (1978’s “Blood Relations”) and John Schlesinger (1975’s “Day of the Locust”).

One of his best roles was as a detective in Alan Pakula’s Klute (1971). During the filming of Klute, he met Fonda, with whom he had a three-year relationship that began at the end of his second marriage to actress Shirley Douglas. He and Douglas married in 1966 but divorced in 1971.

In 1966, Sutherland had twins with Douglas: Rachel and Kiefer, who was named after Warren Kiefer, the screenwriter of Sutherland’s first film, “Castle of the Living Dead.”

In 1974, the actor began living with actress Francine Racette, with whom he remained forever. They had three children: Roeg, born in 1974 and named after director Nicolas Roeg (“The Gondolas in Black”); Rossif, born in 1978 and named after director Frederick Rossif; and Angus Redford, born in 1979 and named after Robert Redford.

It was Redford who, to the surprise of some, cast Sutherland in the role of the father in his directorial debut, “Ordinary Family,” in 1980. Redford’s drama about a handsome suburban family destroyed by tragedy won four Oscars, including Best Picture.

Sutherland was overlooked by the Academy for most of his career. He was never nominated, but received an honorary Oscar in 2017. However, he did win an Emmy in 1995 for the TV movie Citizen X and was nominated for seven Golden Globes (including for his performances in MASH and Normal Family), winning two of them – again for Citizen X and for the 2003 TV movie Path to War.

“Ordinary Family” also heralded a shift in Sutherland’s career toward more mature and sometimes less unconventional characters.

His New York stage debut in 1981, however, was a disastrous one. He played Humbert Humbert in Edward Albee’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and the critics were merciless; the play was canceled after a dozen performances.

A lull followed in the 1980s, which was due to flops such as the satire “Gas” (1981) and the comedy “Crackers” (1984).

But Sutherland continued to work tirelessly. He had a brief but memorable role in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991). He played the patriarch again in Redford’s 1993 film “Six Degrees of Separation.” He played track coach Bill Bowerman in 1998’s “Without Limits.”

Over the past decade, Sutherland has increasingly worked in television, most memorably in the HBO series “Path to War,” in which he played President Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, Clark Clifford. It was a fitting, if ironic, conclusion to a career that began with “MASH.”