Sixty years of career, more than 200 films, the immense size from New Brunswick (Canada) played in television series from 1962, before obtaining his first role in the cinema in The Castle of the Living Dead (Warren Kiefer and Luciano Ricci, 1964) with Christopher Lee. His interpretation of Vernon L. Pinkley in The Bastard Dozen by Robert Aldrich (In Fourth Gear, What Happened to Baby Jane?) produced in 1967, allowed him to collaborate with prodigious actors such as Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson and Ernest Borgnine.
Game set and MASH££££
But Donald Sutherland is incontestably linked to the decade that followed and which opened with a completely crazy medical comedy about the Korean War: MASH by Robert Altman, in which he plays an anti-militarist surgeon, Hawkeye Pierce, more concerned with getting into trouble than defending his country.
The flourishing Seventies continued with incredible gems like Johnny Got his Gun (1971), a pacifist firebrand and Dalton Trumbo's only film. The same year, he played John Klute, a private detective helped in his investigation by a New York prostitute (Jane Fonda). A breathtaking thriller, Klute inaugurates Alan J. Pakula's paranoia trilogy.
From Bertolucci to Nicolas Roeg via The Hunger Games££££
In turn Mussolini's merciless Black Shirt in 1900 by Bernardo Bertolucci, unexpected seducer with a shaved head and flanked by prosthetics in Fellini's Casanova, accountant clumsy lover of an actress in search of fame in The Day of the Scourge (John Schlesinger, 1975), body snatcher in the making in the terrifying Invasion of the Defilers by Philip Kaufman, Donald Sutherland also remains forever this inconsolable father after the tragic death of his granddaughter and whose impossible mourning stirs the still waters of Venice. Don't Look Back by Nicolas Roeg, a masterpiece of fantastic cinema for a genius actor who defied time and still spoke to new generations with the ascendancy of a dictator and the cruel wisdom of a patriarch in the Hunger Games saga (2012-2023).
