DONALD SUTHERLAND, A CANADIAN REVOLUTIONARY

Donald Sutherland

Today, The Grandma has stayed at home watching some films of one of her favourite actors, Donald Sutherland. The Grandma admires Sutherland a lot and she loves his films.

It is impossible to choose only one work of Sutherland but The Grandma remembers his great performance in Revolution, a 1985 British historical drama film directed by Hugh Hudson, written by Robert Dillon, and starring Al Pacino and Nastassja Kinski. The film stars Pacino as a New York fur trapper who involuntarily gets enrolled in the Revolutionary forces during the American Revolutionary War. In this film, Donald Sutherland plays Sargent Major Peasy character.

The Grandma has gone to the library to search the book Revolution, a wonderful novel written by Jann Huizenga and Linda Huizenga that explains the events of the American Revolution in the 18th century.

Before going to the library and before watching Donald Sutherland's films, The Grandma has continued studying her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 6. The Functions (VI) (Spanish Version)

Donald McNichol Sutherland, CC (born 17 July 1935) is a Canadian actor whose film career spans more than five decades.

Sutherland rose to fame after starring in a series of successful films including The Dirty Dozen (1967), M*A*S*H (1970), Kelly's Heroes (1970), Klute (1971), Don't Look Now (1973), Fellini's Casanova (1976), 1900 (1976), Animal House (1978), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Ordinary People (1980), Eye of the Needle (1981) and Revolution (1985) with Al Pacino. He subsequently established himself as one of the most respected, prolific and versatile character actors of Canada.

He later went on to star in many other successful films where he appeared either in leading or supporting roles such as A Dry White Season (1989), JFK (1991), Outbreak (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), Without Limits (1998), The Italian Job (2003), Cold Mountain (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Aurora Borealis (2006) and The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2015).

Donald & Kiefer Sutherland

Sutherland has been nominated for eight Golden Globe Awards, winning two for his performances in the television films Citizen X (1995) and Path to War (2002); the former also earned him a Primetime Emmy Award.

Inductee of Hollywood Walk of Fame and Canadian Walk of Fame, he also received a Canadian Academy Award for the drama film Threshold (1981). Several media outlets and movie critics describe him as one of the best actors who have never been nominated for an Academy Award. In 2017, he received an Academy Honorary Award for his contributions to cinema.

He is the father of actors Kiefer Sutherland, Rossif Sutherland and Angus Sutherland.

Sutherland was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, the son of Dorothy Isobel and Frederick McLea Sutherland (1894–1983), who worked in sales and ran the local gas, electricity and bus company. He is of Scottish, German and English ancestry. As a child, he had rheumatic fever, hepatitis, and poliomyelitis. His teenage years were spent in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. He obtained his first part-time job, at the age of 14, as a news correspondent for local radio station CKBW.

More information: BFI Film Forever

Sutherland graduated from Bridgewater High School. He then studied at Victoria University, an affiliated college of the University of Toronto, where he met his first wife Lois Hardwick, not to be confused with the child star of the same name, and graduated with a double major in engineering and drama. He had at one point been a member of the UC Follies comedy troupe in Toronto. He changed his mind about becoming an engineer, and left Canada for Britain in 1957, studying at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

After quitting the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), Sutherland spent a year and a half at the Perth Repertory Theatre in Scotland.

In the early to mid-1960s, Sutherland began to gain small roles in British films and TV such as a hotel receptionist in The Sentimental Agent (1963). He featured alongside Christopher Lee in horror films such as Castle of the Living Dead (1964) and Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965). He also had a supporting role in the Hammer Films production Die! Die! My Darling! (1965), with Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers. In the same year, he appeared in the Cold War classic The Bedford Incident and appeared in the TV series The Saint and in the TV series Gideon's Way.

In 1966, Sutherland appeared in the BBC TV play Lee Oswald-Assassin, playing a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, Charles Givens even though Givens himself was an African-American.

Donald Sutherland

In 1967, he appeared in The Avengers. He also made a second, and more substantial appearance in The Saint.

In 1968, after the breakthrough in the UK-filmed The Dirty Dozen, Sutherland left London for Hollywood. He then appeared in two war films, playing the lead role as Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's MASH in 1970; and, again in 1970, as hippie tank commander Oddball in Kelly's Heroes.

Sutherland starred with Gene Wilder in the 1970 comedy Start the Revolution Without Me. During the filming of the Academy Award-winning detective thriller Klute, Sutherland had an intimate relationship with co-star Jane Fonda. Sutherland and Fonda went on to co-produce and star together in the anti-Vietnam War documentary F.T.A. (1972), consisting of a series of sketches performed outside army bases in the Pacific Rim and interviews with American troops who were then on active service. A follow up to their teaming up in Klute, Sutherland and Fonda performed together in Steelyard Blues (1973), a freewheeling, Age-of-Aquarius, romp-and-roll caper from the writer David S. Ward.

Sutherland found himself as a leading man throughout the 1970s in films such as the Venice-based psychological horror film Don't Look Now (1973), co-starring Julie Christie, a role which saw him nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Actor, the war film The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976) and the thriller Eye of the Needle which was filmed on location on the Isle of Mull, West Scotland. His role as Corpse of Lt. Robert Schmied in the Maximilian Schell's 1976 German film-directed End of the Game is listed in crazy credits. and as the ever-optimistic health inspector in the science fiction/horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) alongside Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum.

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He helped launch the internationally popular Canadian television series Witness to Yesterday, with a performance as the Montreal doctor Norman Bethune, a physician and humanitarian, largely talking of Bethune's experiences in revolutionary China. Sutherland also had a role as pot-smoking Professor Dave Jennings in National Lampoon's Animal House in 1978, making himself known to younger fans as a result of the movie's popularity.

He won acclaim for his performance in the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 epic film 1900 and as the conflicted father in the Academy Award-winning family drama Ordinary People (1980), alongside Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton. In 1981, he narrated A War Story, an Anne Wheeler film. He played the role of physician-hero Norman Bethune in two biographical films in 1977 and 1990.

Some of Sutherland's better known roles in the 1980s and 1990s were in the South African apartheid drama A Dry White Season (1989), alongside Marlon Brando and Susan Sarandon; as a sadistic warden in Lock Up (1989) with Sylvester Stallone; as an incarcerated pyromaniac in the firefighter thriller Backdraft (1990) alongside Kurt Russell and Robert De Niro, as the humanitarian doctor-activist Norman Bethune in 1990's Bethune: The Making of a Hero, and as a snobbish New York City art dealer in Six Degrees of Separation (1993), with Stockard Channing and Will Smith.

Donald Sutherland & Jane Fonda

In the 1991 Oliver Stone film JFK, he played a mysterious Washington intelligence officer, reputed to have been L. Fletcher Prouty, who spoke of links to the military–industrial complex in the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He played psychiatrist and visionary Wilhelm Reich in the video for Kate Bush's 1985 single, Cloudbusting.

In 1992, he played the role of Merrick in the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with Kristy Swanson. In 1994, he played the head of a government agency hunting for aliens that take over people's bodies similar to the premise of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the movie of Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 book The Puppet Masters.

In 1994, Sutherland played a software company's scheming CEO in Barry Levinson's drama Disclosure opposite Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, and in 1995 was cast as Maj. Gen. Donald McClintock in Wolfgang Petersen's Outbreak. He was later cast in 1996 for only the second time with his son Kiefer in Joel Schumacher's A Time to Kill.

Sutherland played famous American Civil War General P.G.T. Beauregard in the 1999 film The Hunley. He played an astronaut in Space Cowboys (2000), with co-stars Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones and James Garner.

Sutherland was a model for Chris Claremont and John Byrne to create Donald Pierce, the character in the Marvel Comics, which the last name comes from Sutherland's character in the 1970 film's M*A*S*H, Hawkeye Pierce.

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In more recent years, Sutherland was known for his role as Reverend Monroe in the Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003), in the remake of The Italian Job (2003), in the TV series Commander in Chief (2005–2006), in the movie Fierce People (2005) with Diane Lane and Anton Yelchin, and as Mr. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice (2005), starring alongside Keira Knightley.

Beginning in 2012, Sutherland portrayed President Snow, the main antagonist of The Hunger Games film franchise, in The Hunger Games (2012), The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 1 (2014), and Part 2 (2015). His role was well received by fans and critics.

In 2016, he was a member of the main competition jury of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. On 6 September 2017, it was announced that Sutherland, along with 3 other recipients, will receive an Honorary Oscar, from Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sutherland's first Academy Award in six decades.

Sutherland was made an Officer of the Order of Canada on 18 December 1978 and promoted to Companion of the Order of Canada in 2019. He was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 2000. He maintains a home in Georgeville, Quebec.

More information: VOA News

 I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him.

But I certainly do take the preparation home.

Donald Sutherland