More Donald Sutherland Bios & Profiles
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Biography #2 (for Cold Mountain)
Donald Sutherland is one of the most prolific and versatile of motion picture actors, whose offbeat elegance is evident in an astonishing array of more than one hundred films. These films range from the biting political satire of Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. to the intimate drama of Robert Redford's Ordinary People to the subtle intricacy of Alan Pakula's Klute to the eccentric romanticism of Fellini's Casanova.Born in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada, Sutherland began his career as a disc jockey, at fourteen years of age, and won acclaim for a vivid radio portrayal of Scrooge in Dickens' A Christmas Carol. His performance in a University of Toronto production of The Tempest brought him to the attention of Herbert Whitaker, then critic of the Toronto Globe and Mail, who suggested to Sutherland that he seriously consider an acting career--rather than engineering. Before earning his degree, he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and made his London stage debut in August for the People with Rex Harrison, and spent the next several years there performing in theatre and television. In 1964 producer Paul Maslansky signed Sutherland for a dual role in The Castle of the Living Dead, followed by a brief series of other horror films, including Die! Die! My Darling with Tallulah Bankhead.
Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. which was Sutherland's fourteenth motion picture, brought him international stardom. He went on to make films with Bernardo Bertolucci (1900), Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now), John Schlesinger (The Day of the Locust), Paul Mazursky (Alex in Wonderland), Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen), John Sturges (The Eagle Has Landed), Herbert Ross (Max Dugan Returns), Louis Malle (Crackers), Philip Borsos (Bethune), Ron Howard (Backdraft) and Oliver Stone (JFK). During the eighteen months or so preceding Ordinary People, Sutherland starred in A Man, a Woman, and a Bank; a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Great Train Robbery; Murder by Decree, Bear Island and Nothing Personal, as well as a cameo appearance in the National Lampoon classic Animal House. Following Ordinary People, Sutherland starred in Richard Marquand's Eye of the Needle, and Richard Pearce's Threshold, for which he received the 1983 Genie Award as Best Actor.
Other 1980s films include The Wolf at the Door, Apprentice to Murder, and A Dry White Season. In the 1990s Sutherland appeared in Eminent Domain, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Benefit of the Doubt, Fred Schepisi's film adaptation of John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, Percy Adlon's Younger and Younger, Barry Levinson's Disclosure, Outbreak, A Time to Kill, The Shadow Conspiracy, The Assignment, and Without Limits, for which he won a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Sutherland more recently starred with James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones and Clint Eastwood in Eastwood's Space Cowboys, The Art of War, and Feng Xiaogang's Big Shot's Funeral. Television projects include Behind the Mask, The Hunley, Uprising, and Path to War.
1981 marked Sutherland's return to the stage in a Broadway production of (Edward Albee's adaptation of) Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita on Broadway, and in 1983 he made his American television debut in an adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent for Hallmark Hall of Fame. Herecently appeared at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre of Lincoln Center in Jon Robin Baitz's Ten Unknowns earning Sutherland an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination; and starred in London opposite John Rubenstein in Enigmatic Variations," an English-language translation, by his son Roeg Sutherland, of Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's hit French play.
Bio courtesy Miramax for "Cold Mountain" (02-Jan-2004)
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