Donald Sutherland (1935-2024)

2000 Lifetime Artistic Achievement (Film)

Donald Sutherland is one of Canada's most distinguished and prolific actors. He is also a bona fide "movie star" whose career in film and television spans over thirty-five years and includes more than 100 roles in a truly remarkable gallery of screen personae. With his offbeat elegance, often enigmatic screen presence, legendary perfectionism and attention to detail, he has imbued each of his roles with magnetism and believability.

Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1935, Donald Sutherland first trod the boards in 1952 at Hart House while studying engineering at the University of Toronto. After further stage training in Toronto and in London, England, he made his screen debut in 1964 in The Castle of the Living Dead.

During his extraordinary career Mr. Sutherland worked with leading international film directors and played widely diverse characters of great complexity, from a tortured priest in Act of the Heart, to the bewildered father in Ordinary People, to the cynical Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce in Robert Altman's hit comedy M*A*S*H, the film that made him an international star. Other film credits include Kelly's Heroes, The Dirty Dozen, Klute, Don't Look Now, Eye of the Needle, Day of the Locust, Bethune: The Making of a Hero, Fellini's Casanova, and Bertolucci's 1900. Within the last decade he has appeared in JFK, Six Degrees of Separation, Outbreak, Without Limits, and the current hit Space Cowboys, directed by Clint Eastwood. Mr. Sutherland recently returned to the stage to play a reclusive Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an English translation (by his son Roeg Sutherland) of Enigmatic Variations, at the Savoy Theatre in London, the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Donald Sutherland won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Citizen X (HBO). He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1978.

Though he now spends much of his time in Los Angeles, he maintains strong links with Canada: he acted as Master of Ceremonies for the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards Gala from 1992-1994.