We’re tipping our Stetsons to the versatile star of M*A*S*H, Forsaken, Lawmen: Bass Reeves and The Hunger Games.
The C&I crew wants to wish happy trails to Donald Sutherland, the prolific and prodigious Canadian-born actor who passed away Thursday in Miami at age 88.
Most recently seen in the limited-run series Lawmen: Bass Reeves as Judge Isaac Parker, who hired the title character as the first Black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River, Sutherland repeatedly demonstrated his extraordinary versatility through a career that spanned seven decades.
He appeared in everything from wartime comedies (M*A*S*H, Kelly’s Heroes) to horror movies (Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Invasion of the Body Snatchers), contemporary dramas (Ordinary People, Reign Over Me) to acclaimed comedies (National Lampoon’s Animal House, Start the Revolution Without Me), tense thrillers (Don’t Look Now, The Eagle Has Landed) to box-office blockbusters (A Time to Kill, Disclosure).
But wait, there’s more.
Sutherland played an out-of-town detective seeking clues from a New York prostitute (Jane Fonda) about a murder back home in Klute, a golden-ager astronaut (flying alongside James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and director-star Clint Eastwood) in Space Cowboys, a mentor to a monster hunter in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer, an ice-cold arsonist who’s unnervingly proud of his handiwork in Backdraft, a possible member of an alleged assassination plot in JFK, the tyrannical leader of a dystopian society in the Hunger Games franchise — and Jesus Christ in Dalton Trumbo’s 1971 screen adaptation of his anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun.

And speaking of Kelly’s Heroes: Sutherland had quite a tale to tell involving that movie — and his co-star, Clint Eastwood — during one of my sporadic interviews with the actor. You see, in the late '60s, Sutherland and his second wife, Shirley Douglas, entertained Black Panthers, anti-war activists and other would-be revolutionaries in their Beverly Hills home. In 1969, Douglas was arrested for allegedly buying hand grenades for the Panthers from an FBI undercover agent — “With a personal check!” Sutherland told me with a bemused but disapproving grin.
The arresting officers did not find it quite so funny at the time. Neither did Sutherland.
“Three o’clock in the morning, 17 policemen came into my house,” Sutherland said. “The Beverly Hills guys were saying, ‘We're terribly sorry we had to wake you up, we’re terribly sorry for the inconvenience, excuse me, would it be too much trouble?’ But the FBI guys stuck a gun to my 10-year-old's head.”
Yikes.
“They broke the door down,” Sutherland said. “And they said things to Tom, my stepson, things like, ‘We're taking your mother to jail.’ He said, ‘When will she be back?’ ‘Well, if I have anything to do about it, never.’”
And where was Sutherland while all this was going on? Far away in Yugoslavia, playing a hippie-dippy tank commander opposite Clint Eastwood in Kelly's Heroes.
“And the way I heard it was better than it was possible to hear it from anyone else. I was out in the field, all alone by my tank, waiting for the scene to start, and I see a solitary figure coming towards me. It’s Clint Eastwood. He says, ‘Donald!’ And I said, ‘Yeah?’ And I start walking through the field toward him. And I just have the image of my tank here, the whole rest of the army there — and Clint in the middle of the field with me, telling me that my wife’s been arrested for buying hand grenades for the Black Panther Party.
“Bless his heart, Clint was so sweet. It was so much an anathema to his own political convictions, but he was so generous and lovely. He was so sympathetic. It was like I had incurred some kind of social embarrassment.”
By the way: Clint Eastwood confirmed this story for me a few years later. “But I must admit,” he said, “I waited until he moved away from the tank before I told him what had happened.” And then Eastwood smiled.

David Oyelowo, who starred as Bass Reeves, remembers Sutherland fondly: “Given the iconic status he rightly achieved,” Oyelowo told Deadline, “having a front row seat to Donald Sutherland’s last onscreen performance was both a privilege and clear evidence to me of his deep passion for the craft of acting. The glint in his eye was that of an inquisitive, hungry artist still on the hunt for the truth. Seeing that glint, up close, in the eyes of a legend was something to behold.”
C&I readers may also remember him in such movies as Dan Candy’s Law (1974), co-starring Chief Dan George and featuring Sutherland as a Canadian Mountie hunting an accused First Nations killer (Godon Tootoosis); Cold Mountain, the 2003 Civil War drama starring Nicole Kidman, Jude Law and Oscar-winner Renee Zellweger, in which he was cast as Reverend Monroe; Dawn Rider (2012), a direct-to-video production that was a remake of the same-titled 1935 John Wayne movie; and Forsaken (2015) the first film in which he co-starred with his son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, playing a preacher who strongly disapproves of his notorious offspring’s career as a gunslinger.
Donald Sutherland received an Honorary Oscar in 2017 in recognition of his many and varied achievement in film. “I wish I could say thank you to all the characters I've played," he said during his acceptance speech. “Thank them for using their lives to inform my lives.”
Even so, Kiefer Sutherland admitted to C&I in our 2015 cover story about Forsaken that he was relatively late in fully appreciating the enormity of his father’s talent.
“I was always aware that he was an actor,” Kiefer said. “But when I was growing up, you could really only go see movies in a movie theater — and his movies were all for adults, so I wasn’t allowed to go see those. When I was really, truly aware, I think I had just turned about 17, and I was in Los Angeles. I was already working and about to get ready to do a film called Stand by Me. I was staying at a family friend’s house until I got an apartment, and he had — this is ironic — Beta tapes of every film my father had made. So in about two or three days, I watched Don’t Look Now, 1900, Casanova, Ordinary People, Day of the Locust, Klute, and M*A*S*H.
“And after that, I remember phoning my dad and telling him how sorry I was that I didn’t realize, at least in my opinion, how important he was as an actor. I was embarrassed that, as a son, I hadn’t known that. Of course, in hindsight, I can look back on it and say, Well, how on earth would I have known? But I was so moved by not only how excellent he was, but also the diversity in the characters he played. And he had a command as an actor that I was just so impressed with.
“That happened in a two- or three-day period, while I was watching his films, and it had a really profound effect on me. I think that was kind of a seminal moment for me, in the sense that most children try to distance themselves from their parents, and it’s part of a growing process where you try to move on and find your own way. But I remember after that three-day period, that was the moment where I discovered that, certainly as an actor, he was someone I would want to emulate. That was a big shift for me.”

Their relationship brought added dimensions, and greater emotional resonance, during a scene where father and son have to part.
“Yes,” Kiefer agreed, “there are a few points in the film that have always felt to me like they were ours. There were moments for us as a father and a son in reality, from a lifetime of things unsaid and maybe not done or finished, that were there. I had another moment in the church where that emotional breakdown had nothing to do with what was on the page — it was a very odd, personal thing that I just shared with him. It was in a space where I knew that’s what was required for telling the story.
“I think that scene you’re talking about also was his personal expression back to me. I only can say that because I know what he said to me when we finished shooting that scene. We only shot it twice, and I looked back to him, and the director, Jon Cassar, came up and said, ‘That was beautiful. I don’t need any more.’ I’m on the horse and I ride back and my father looks at me and he says, ‘Are we good?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we’re good.’ And he wasn’t talking about the scene, either. You know what I mean? There’s a couple moments in this film that were really shared moments between us as two people, and as a father and a son… And I said, “Yeah.” He smiled, and that was that. [Forsaken] means a great deal to me, obviously — more than any other single thing I’ve done — for those moments.”
Kiefer and Donald Sutherland in Forsaken
Photography: Courtesy Momentum Pictures © 2016 and Paramount+ 2024