Donald Sutherland Biography

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 Donald Sutherland remained one of Hollywood’s busiest actors, appearing in nearly 200 films and TV shows by the end of his 60-year career. 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).

Sutherland 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 later years he became the familiar voice of many television commercials, made the occasional film appearance (2003’s The Italian Job, with Mark Wahlberg), and starred in TV shows, including Commander-in-Chief (2005, with Geena Davis) and Dirty Sexy Money (2007-09). More prominently, he played the meanie President Coriolanus Snow in the futuristic thriller The Hunger Games (with Jennifer Lawrence, 2012) and its sequels The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015).

Donald Sutherland died in 2024 “after a long illness,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, quoting CAA agent Missy Davy. He was somehow never nominated for a competitive Academy Award during his long and distinguished career, but he was given an honorary Oscar in 2017 by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.