US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are among many across the world who have paid tribute to distinguished Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, who died at the age of 88 on Thursday.
Biden said Sutherland was a “one-of-a-kind actor who inspired and entertained the world for decades”.
Trudeau praised the actor as “a man with a strong presence, a brilliance in his craft and truly, truly a great Canadian artist”.
In other tributes, Ron Howard, who directed Sutherland in the 1991 film Backdraft, said that he was “one of the most intelligent, interesting [and] engrossing film actors of all time”.
Jane Fonda was Sutherland’s co-star in Alan J Pakula’s 1971 thriller, Klute, about a detective whose hunt for a missing person is assisted by a high-priced call girl. They dated for two years.
In a tribute on Instagram, Fonda described Sutherland as a “brilliant actor” with whom she shared “quite a few adventures”, including performances to active servicemen during an anti-Vietnam war tour in Hawaii, Japan and the Philippines.
The BBC reports that Helen Mirren, who appeared opposite Sutherland in 2017 film The Leisure Seeker, paid tribute to her “friend” and “one of the smartest actors I ever worked with” in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter.
“He had a wonderful enquiring brain, and a great knowledge on a wide variety of subjects,” she said.
The official Hunger Games X account posted: “We asked the kindest man in the world to portray the most corrupt, ruthless dictator we’ve ever seen. Such was the power and skill of Donald Sutherland’s acting that he created one more indelible character among many others that defined his legendary career. We are privileged to have known and worked with him, and our thoughts are with his family.”
Born in 1935, Sutherland started as a radio news reporter and graduated in engineering at the University of Toronto.
He went to London in 1957 to pursue acting. Small roles in film and television followed, including appearances alongside Christopher Lee in Castle of the Living Dead and Dr Terror’s House of Horrors.
Other roles included parts in episodes of The Saint, with Roger Moore.
This led to his breakthrough role in the World War II action film, The Dirty Dozen.
In turn, this role led to a lead role as Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce Jr in M*A*S*H, the satirical series about Korean War medics.
In another war film, Kelly’s Heroes, he played Sergeant Oddball.
In 1971’s Klute, Sutherland played a detective whose hunt for a missing person is assisted by a high-priced call girl, played by Jane Fonda, who won an Oscar.
In 1973 Sutherland shot Don’t Look Now in Venice with director Nicolas Roeg. The film featured a sex scene with Julie Christie, which was so graphic it was believed they had had real sex.
Sutherland played a sadistic fascist in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 and the title role in Federico Fellini’’s Casanova. Fellini said he cast Sutherland because he was “a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator”.
The 1970s saw appearances in The Eagle Has Landed, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
In the 980s, Sutherland played the father of a suicidal teenager in the Oscar-winning Ordinary People, a British sergeant major in Hugh Hudson’s Revolution, and he appeared with Kate Bush in the video for her track, Cloudbusting.
The 1990s led to Backdraft, JFK, Six Degrees of Separation and A Time to Kill.
In the 2000s, Sutherland appeared in the TV series Dirty Sexy Money and Commander-in-Chief.
Recently, he played President Snow in The Hunger Games.
Sutherland was married three times, and had four sons, Kiefer, Roeg, Rossif and Angus, and one daughter, Rachel.
Sutherland was never nominated for an Oscar but received an honorary Academy Award in 2017.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/serrvill/32735436617]