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When I think of the faces of New Hollywood, that lone era when radical new stories and challenging artistry dominated the American movie scene, my mind immediately goes to Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie... and, sometimes more than any of the rest, Donald Sutherland. Donald Sutherland, who was quite different from most of these others. Where they instinctively commanded power on-screen, he could shrink into the background of even the movies he headlined. Where they eschewed confidence and charisma, he could be awkward and soft-spoken. And where several of them had magazine cover looks, he with his thin face, pronounced features, and penetrating blue eyes did not fit either the image of glamourous Hollywood or conventional male sex appeal (and yet he featured in arguably the most iconic sex scene of the 1970s).
And yet he was as big a star as any of them -his name could open a movie, and across a range of genres and styles that many of these other actors couldn't boast. Did Al Pacino make a broad comedy? Did Jane Fonda take on a horror movie? Well Sutherland did both, and many other kinds of movies during that decade where he was on top of the world in both recognition and quality of work.
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Donald Sutherland's recent passing on June 20th was a bigger loss for cinema than I think most movie fans realize. Not only was this a man with a film career that spanned seven decades, but he was a crucial and influential figure to one of the most critical periods in American movie history -consciously or not representing something that not a lot of his contemporaries could, and almost none of his successors have. He was also, but for maybe Christopher Plummer, the most internationally renowned and respected Canadian performer of a generation -something not taken for granted here, where his four-year marriage to actress Shirley Douglas, daughter of healthcare champion and national hero Tommy Douglas -and which birthed his most famous son Kiefer, is venerated as a union of Canadian royalty.
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While Sutherland has been mainstay on screens for virtually his entire career, he was never more prominent than in the 70s, where he appeared in some of the most important movies of the era. From M*A*S*H at the start of the decade, where he was the original Hawkeye Pierce, to its cousin Animal House at the end of the decade. Supporting Jane Fonda’s most important performance in Klute, and then supporting her passionate activism, which he shared, in their anti-Vietnam War tour immortalized in their seminal documentary F.T.A. He gave in my opinion his greatest performance as the paranoid protagonist of psychological horror film Don’t Look Now, and was drawn again to that genre in the celebrated remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He made films with Fellini and Bertolucci, and at the end of the decade a little family drama called Ordinary People -one of his most acclaimed dramatic performances. And yet as that movie swept the Oscar tallies in 1981, he was the only cast member not to receive a nomination. He never received a nomination through his entire career -which is frankly outrageous. But still, a body of work that most actors would envy.
But that star power receded in the decades that followed, and though Sutherland was still prominent, he stopped headlining movies as often as he used to. Even though many of his contemporaries continued to retain their cultural capital, his started to dissipate. And you could argue that career or collaborative choices may have played a factor, but something else clearly did too -something that hadn’t been an issue, certainly not for Donald Sutherland in the 1970s. And to get into it, we need to talk about the Movie Star.
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The Movie Star, a critical aspect historically of the Hollywood industry, has evolved and changed shape over time. During the classic Hollywood era, movie stars were the most important commodities for a film. Literally in some cases they were commodities -under contract and thus essentially ‘owned’ by the movie studios. The titles and premises didn’t really matter that much. What mattered was if it was a Cary Grant movie or a John Wayne movie, a Joan Crawford movie or a Rita Hayworth movie. Every star was their own brand in competition with one another -all of the names just mentioned were in fact chosen by the studios-, and for this reason while acting talent was certainly prioritized, so too was a very particular movie star look and charisma. Classically masculine brusqueness for the men, impervious beauty for the women -or at the very least the kind of features that could fit neatly into one of several preordained archetypes.. And this lasted through much of the Golden Age. But the advent of New Hollywood started to change things, and with much of it’s modus operandi being revolt of classic Hollywood, its movie stars were quite different themselves -their image one of more independence, and their personal brands more determined by the kinds of movies they made, going hand in hand with the emergence of the auteur director in Hollywood. The old models of looks and charisma still mattered, but not as deeply as they once did. And because of this, movie stars could come in the form of Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Lily Tomlin, Sissy Spacek, and Donald Sutherland.
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Sutherland has often been praised for his unconventional looks -which can be a bit of an awkward two-edged sword (I can imagine it feels a little bad for folks like Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi too), especially considering he was apparently in his youth self-conscious about his appearance; but it really isn’t just that he looked a little different, it was a whole manner to him that also stemmed from his singular soothing voice (I don’t believe that there really is a Canadian accent so-to-speak, but he seems to have it), his body language, and his various performance choices, often subtle or more considered than say an equivalent by Jack Nicholson. And it wasn’t that this made him unattractive; on the contrary it made him attractive as a real person. He felt more natural, more tangible than his contemporaries -even in contexts extremely foreign like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Fellini’s Casanova. His activism was a part of this, no doubt -very soon after he’d broken out he established himself as a firm anti-war voice, giving the public a glimpse of his character beyond the screen.
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He was closely linked to the counterculture movement from the start -through the rebellious upstarts he played in The Dirty Dozen and M*A*S*H, and he seemed to epitomize that privately as well. And though there were many other pop culture symbols of this movement -Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, John and Yoko, his one-time fling Jane Fonda of course, Sutherland was a relatively relatable image of the counterculture. He wasn’t glamourous or ostentatious, he appeared witty with his principals, more astute -like he had something on the establishment. And even as the counterculture moment started to fade, he exemplified that same attitude in his choices of projects -drawn it seemed to weirder, more provocative movies. Don’t Look Now is the prime example with its formal deconstruction, exacting editing, atmosphere of paranoia, and general subversive approach to the thriller. It was a controversial movie, not least because of its iconic sex scene, constructed in a way that convinced audiences it was unsimulated -it wasn’t, but its effective eroticism does challenge the idea of Sutherland’s lack of sex appeal. Either way it didn't matter though during this age when that wasn't a necessity to be a star. Donald Sutherland greatly benefited from coming up at a time of limited shallowness in the Hollywood machine.
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But then the 70s came to an end. New Hollywood came to an end, and was replaced by a system more commercial and image-driven than ever before. And while many of the stars who were made in the 70s were able to carry over, eventually find new niches for themselves that maintained their leading man power, Sutherland wasn't able to. Arguably, some of those unconventional choices played a part -he left Hollywood at several points to go make movies in Britain or Canada, while some of that hip streak of rebel characters in his early movies had given way with age to a more mature breed of parts. Great as he is in Ordinary People, he is still playing a yuppie dad; and there's a particular irony that an actor who began the 70s as the hero of M*A*S*H gleefully thumbing his nose at the establishment, ended that decade in Animal House -a movie that is a direct successor to M*A*S*H- playing a professor and part of that very same establishment the younger generation now gets to rebel against.
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Sutherland didn’t particularly lend himself well to the emerging dominance of the four-quadrant blockbuster, he didn’t have ubiquity with a genre or style like De Niro or Pacino, and with images of traditional masculinity and conventional beauty standards back in vogue it meant that he wasn’t. But it’s not that this really bothered him; he still headlined smaller movies now and again like Eye of the Needle, Ordeal by Innocence, and A Dry White Season, and very organically shifted into a career as a character actor. He had of course a stand-out role in Oliver Stone’s JFK, appeared in the film adaptation of Six Degrees of Separation (which had given Will Smith his first major movie role), and got to be one of Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys. Still, it just feels a little unfair that while Dustin Hoffman got top billing on Outbreak, along with Rene Russo and Morgan Freeman, Sutherland who was Hoffman’s peer in the 70s and plays essentially the main villain, is hidden away in the post-title credits.
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He was a really good character actor though, bringing that same smooth demeanour and screen presence now touched with the gravitas of age. It was cool to see him, even for just a short period. Being a veteran had its perks -he got to shine in a whole new way in movies like Pride & Prejudice (a late-period fan favourite performance). Still, through the 2000s, his roles started diminishing even further in significance until a little movie in 2012 called The Hunger Games made the smart choice to cast him as its main antagonist -the dystopian despot Coriolanus Snow. Suddenly he had major franchise recognition, returning to the part in all three of its sequels -and he made for a memorably menacing villain in these movies too. It suddenly became one of his most famed and acclaimed parts. Donald Sutherland had a multi-generational legacy -to the point this character he originated on-screen was the centrepiece of a big franchise blockbuster just last year.
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But looking back now at his career in lieu of his passing, it is that first stage of it that most stands out -not just as the point where he was the biggest but also where he did his most interesting work and defined himself as a star worth celebrating. Even as a chameleon in his performances, he was the odd and ordinary guy of the 1970s -and that particular archetype of a persona could only exist as a major movie star in that decade. The Movie Star, as a cultural thing, has been largely absent for a little while now -as most movies are sold via their pop culture franchise than any particular actor involved (you might have noticed that above-title billing has mostly gone away for major studio releases). But as franchise fatigue begins to form we’re maybe starting to see a crop of new movie stars emerge: Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Sydney Sweeney, Glen Powell, maybe Austin Butler and Jodie Comer. Is there a Donald Sutherland among them? It doesn’t seem like it now, but I’d maybe keep an eye on Jeremy Allan White if he really breaks out from The Bear.
I don’t think we appreciate just how big a shadow Donald Sutherland casts, what he meant to the 1970s and the image of movie stardom more broadly. But then he was never one to really demand that we do, and it’s part of what we liked about him. Apart from the activism where it mattered, he didn’t much draw attention to himself -always seemed humble and approachable. He will live on in his extraordinary body of work and in his legacy as a uniquely representative figure of one of the most important periods in cinema history.
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