Donald Sutherland was perfectly cast as the evil President Snow in «The Hunger Games,» but the late actor was far more than just a YA villain.
Donald Sutherland, whose death at age 88 was announced Thursday by his son Kiefer Sutherland, was never nominated for an Oscar, but those acting opposite the veteran actor often did.
He might be best known to millennials and Gen Z as the dastardly President Snow of the “Hunger Games” films, whose mere glance can make your blood run cold. But for every juicy villain role, there was a corresponding film, like “Ordinary People” or “Pride and Prejudice,” where the depth of his compassion as a father nearly took your breath away.
Here are his 10 most iconic roles we will remember him by.
If “The Dirty Dozen,” released in 1967, put Sutherland on the map, then “M*A*S*H” cemented his place as one of the most important and impressive actors of his generation. In Robert Altman’s masterpiece, which won the Palme d’Or and was nominated for five Academy Awards (including Best Picture), Sutherland plays “Hawkeye” Pierce, a surgeon serving in a makeshift hospital in South Korea during the war. The tone of “M*A*S*H” is decidedly anarchic, veering from wild comedy to sober interludes and back again, with Sutherland and Elliot Gould (as surgeon “Duke”) leading the charge. When Gould protests about missing olives in their martinis, Sutherland coyly responds, “We do have to make certain concessions, we’re three miles from the front line.” (On the massively popular television series that followed, the character would be played by Alan Alda.) At 35, “M*A*S*H” had made Sutherland a massive movie star. – Drew Taylor
Ostensibly a remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and once again based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel “The Body Snatchers,” Philip Kaufman’s 1978 film is a perfect film, amplifying the unease and distrust of the 1970s with a niftily timeless sci-fi horror concept. Sutherland plays a San Francisco Health Department employee who starts to uncover the fact that normal people are being replaced by “pod people” – a race of evil alien doppelgängers. The whip smart script by W.D. Richter incorporates a number of era-specific flourishes – bath houses, a New Age guru played (with aplomb) by Leonard Nimoy, and the idea that being reborn as a new person is a spiritual conversion as much as it is an actual, physical one. Sutherland often played more straight-laced characters guiding audiences through a more fantastical world, which is definitely the case here, as a no-nonsense government employee trying to make sense of a quietly insidious extraterrestrial assault. It’s his steadfastness, too, that makes the ending all the more tragic when – spoiler alert for a movie that came out 46 years ago – it’s revealed that he too has been replaced by a malevolent double. Now there’s no stopping those dastardly aliens! For a story that has been remade countless times, the 1978 version, anchored by Sutherland’s outstanding performance, is clearly the best of the bunch. And if you want even more Sutherland-related alien invasion fun, check out “The Puppet Masters,” a 1994 thriller where he battles a race of alien slugs that control people, based on a 1951 novel by Robert Heinlein.
