Donald Sutherland

Actor

Donald Sutherland was a major counterculture star in the early 1970s, winning critical raves as snarky Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970) and as a small-town detective bonding with a New York call girl in Klute (1971, with his Jane Fonda). Megastardom didn't last, but Sutherland remained one of Hollywood's busiest actors, appearing in nearly 100 features and TV movies by the year 2000. Handsome yet somehow sinister, he was cast as both hero and villain in thrillers like Eye of the Needle (1981) and Outbreak (1995) and in thoughtful dramas like Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980) and Six Degrees of Separation (1993, with Will Smith). He didn't shy away from supporting roles, either, whether lurking as the extracurricular-minded professor in Animal House (1978, with John Belushi) or cavorting with Clint Eastwood and cronies in the feel-good yarn Space Cowboys (2000). In recent years he has become the familiar voice of many television commercials, as well as making the occasional film appearance (2003's The Italian Job, with Mark Wahlberg) and starring in TV shows, including Commander-in-Chief (2005, with Geena Davis) and Dirty Sexy Money (2007).

Extra credit: His son is actor Kiefer Sutherland... Sutherland won an Emmy for the 1995 made-for-TV thriller Citizen X but has never been nominated for an Oscar... M*A*S*H was ranked #56 on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the 100 greatest films of all time... Alan Alda took the role of Hawkeye Pierce in the long-running TV series M*A*S*H... Sutherland appeared in two other offbeat war films of the same era, The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Kelly's Heroes (1970)... He played Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman in Without Limits, the 1998 biopic of runner Steve Prefontaine.

Other actors of Sutherland's era: Peter Fonda, Steve McQueen, Michael Caine, and Sidney Poitier.

Blog posts mentioning Donald Sutherland:
Roy Scheider, Star of Jaws and Jazz