In the late 1970s, during a run of critical and commercial successes including M*A*S*H, Kelly’s Heroes, Klute, Don’t Look Now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Animal House, Donald Sutherland made a pair of films in British Columbia in quick succession. The espionage thriller Bear Island and the romantic crime caper A Man, a Woman and a Bank (both 1979) allowed the actor to play traditional leading roles rather than the offbeat character parts he was known for. “It’s not so much that I’m trying to change my image, it’s more like a painter changing his style,” Sutherland told The New York Times. “I would like to be ordinary for a while.” In a career lasting over 60 years, Sutherland would return to Western Canada several times, leaving behind a body of work that was anything but ordinary.
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1935, Donald McNichol Sutherland endured polio and rheumatic fever as a child. In his teens, he worked as an announcer for a Maritime radio station. Moving to Ontario to attend the University of Toronto, Sutherland auditioned on a dare for a production of Edward Albee’s The Male Animal and got the part. Other stage productions followed. “He was a great actor even then,” Margaret Atwood remembered.
After graduating with a degree in both engineering and drama, Sutherland moved to England for an unhappy nine-month stint at the famed London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
His break came in 1967 with The Dirty Dozen, an ensemble war film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Lee Marvin and John Cassavetes. According to Film Comment, “When co-star Clint Walker refused to perform a bit in which his character impersonates a general, Aldrich delegated the vignette to Sutherland, resulting in the enlargement of his role.” The Dirty Dozen’s success led to his casting in two New Hollywood classics: as an eccentric army surgeon in Robert Altman’s antiwar dark comedy M*A*S*H (1970) and as a detective opposite Jane Fonda in Klute (1971). Sutherland also starred in Don’t Look Now (1973) and the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), two of the most influential horror movies of all time.
In 1975, changes to the Canadian tax code created financial benefits for production companies to film in Canada using homegrown talent. Demand grew for Canadian actors with name recognition to star in what were sometimes called “tax shelter films.” Donald Sutherland fit the bill.
According to The New York Times, “Mr. Sutherland, whose American salary is in the neighborhood of $500,000 a picture, is reportedly being paid $1 million a picture because he is the closest thing Canada has to a native‐born star.”
In 1977 Sutherland formed his own production company, McNichol Pictures Inc., to produce a slate of Canadian-shot projects, including A Man, a Woman and a Bank. As a producer, Sutherland met with B.C. politicians including provincial film commissioner Wolfgang Richter, cabinet minister Grace McCarthy, and mayor Jack Volrich. “Sutherland has been easing his way into unprecedented cooperation with both B.C. and Vancouver civic governments,” claimed the Vancouver Sun.
A Man, a Woman and a Bank was directed by Noel Black (Pretty Poison) and starred Sutherland as a bank robber who falls in love with a photographer (Brooke Adams) while planning a heist. The film includes scenes shot in Vancouver’s Gastown. A young Fred Latremouille, better known as a DJ and TV personality, has a small part as a police officer. “A Man, a Woman and a Bank has some really fine moments and three fine performances,” Roger Ebert wrote in an otherwise mixed review. While characterizing his own performance as “not quite as well defined as I wanted,” Sutherland believed the film helped him turn a corner in his career from idiosyncratic character work to more conventional starring roles. “What I’m doing now is what I felt I would’ve been able to do earlier, but no one would let me,” he told The New York Times. “My work is better and more precise.”
Donald Sutherland in A Man, a Woman and a Bank (1979).
Sutherland also starred in Bear Island, based on a best-selling Alistair MacLean novel, was directed by Don Sharp (Kiss of the Vampire) and produced by Peter Snell (The Wicker Man). The film follows a scientific expedition to a remote Scandinavian island, where the crew discovers murder, sabotage, and a sunken U-boat full of gold. Sutherland plays Lansing, an American marine biologist whose father was the submarine’s commander. Sutherland described his character as “an intelligent, humorous, lonely man.”
Filmed in Stewart, B.C., as well as Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, Bear Island ran into financing problems, and the Bank of Montreal was forced to become an investor in the film. Despite boasting a stellar international cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Lee, and a young Bruce Greenwood, the film came out to dismal reviews. “Bear Island was supposed to be the Canadian film,” Vancouver Sun’s Jamie Lamb wrote, “the one to dispel the notion that Canadian films are somehow inferior to those from other countries…. All Bear Island proves is that Canada can produce a $10 million turkey as easily as anybody else.”
Despite his mixed reviews on the producing front, in the decades to come, Sutherland would cement his reputation as one of the most versatile actors in Hollywood, starring in films as diverse as Ordinary People, JFK, Backdraft, and The Hunger Games franchise. In 1990 he finally realized his long-imagined dream project, starring in Bethune: The Making of a Hero, directed by the Australian-born and B.C.-raised Phillip Borsos (The Grey Fox).
Filmed on location in China as well as Madrid and Montreal, Bethune took five years and involved Canadian, Chinese, and French production companies; it was reportedly the most expensive Canadian film of its time. Sutherland, who had twice portrayed the Canadian surgeon and humanitarian in earlier projects and even attempted to produce a biopic of his own, paid tribute to Bethune’s late director (Borsos died at 41 of leukemia) before a screening of the film during the 2008 Whistler Film Festival, calling it “the best work I have ever done in my life.”
Politically active throughout his career, Sutherland’s support of antiwar and pro-civil rights causes earned him a spot on a National Security Agency watch list. His second wife, Shirley Douglas, daughter of Tommy Douglas, was a civil rights activist who was once arrested for buying grenades on behalf of the Black Panthers (Sutherland, on set in Yugoslavia filming Kelly’s Heroes, heard the news from co-star Clint Eastwood).
In 2011 Sutherland was photographed attending the Occupy Wall Street protests in Vancouver. “I went to Occupy Vancouver,” he told a reporter while promoting The Hunger Games. “It felt so good.” He hoped The Hunger Games franchise, in which he played a dystopian president, would help “wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s.”
Sutherland would share screen credits with his son, actor Kiefer Sutherland, three times over the years: Max Dugan Returns (1983), A Time to Kill (1996), and the Calgary-filmed western Forsaken (2015), where they finally acted alongside each other in a film. His last role would be as a hanging judge in the limited series Bass Reeves. Donald Sutherland died on June 20, 2024.
“He loved what he did and did what he loved,” Kiefer wrote in a social media post. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who at 18 attended the premiere of Bethune, reflected that Sutherland was “truly a great Canadian artist and he will be deeply missed.”
Released only months apart, A Man, a Woman and a Gun and Bear Island offer a snapshot of both an artist and an industry undergoing transformation. A legendary character actor and counterculture hero, Donald Sutherland used his two B.C.-shot films to demonstrate his ability to produce and star in traditional Hollywood films while patiently developing projects he cared deeply about like Bethune. In turn, Sutherland’s tax shelter films helped establish Hollywood North as a viable filming location with a homegrown industry of its own.
