Donald Sutherland, star of M*A*S*H and Hunger Games, dead at 88

He rocketed to fame three years later playing nonconformist surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in director Robert Altman’s Korean War satire M*A*S*H. The film – later spun off into a TV series – depicted hijinks at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, tapping into the anti-war sentiment among many Americans during the Vietnam War era.

Also in 1970, Sutherland starred alongside Telly Savalas and Clint Eastwood in Kelly’s Heroes as Sergeant Oddball on a mission to steal gold from the Nazis.

The following year, he was paired with Fonda, one of Hollywood’s luminaries, in Klute, and then in 1973 played a grieving father in Don’t Look Now that included a sizzling sex scene with Christie. Klute sparked a romance with Fonda, with whom he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

His 1978 films could not have been more different. In the uproarious comedy Animal House, Sutherland played a professor who sleeps with the girlfriend of a fraternity member. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was a successful sci-fi remake of a classic 1956 original, telling the story of alien pods that take over human beings.

Sutherland’s performance in Ordinary People, Hollywood superstar Robert Redford’s directorial debut, helped the 1980 film win four Academy Awards including best picture. Sutherland starred alongside Mary Tyler Moore and Timothy Hutton in this exploration of the splintering of a Midwestern family.

In the 1990s he appeared in films including JFK (1991), Backdraft (1991), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Outbreak (1995), A Time To Kill (1996) and Instinct (1999) and won an Emmy Award for his performance in the 1995 HBO TV movie Citizen X. In the 2000s, he appeared in the acclaimed Cold Mountain (2003) and Pride & Prejudice (2005).

In the Hunger Games films in the 2010s about a dystopian future in which teenagers are sent into a deadly competition as mass entertainment, he reveled in playing the villainous President Coriolanus Snow.

“The reality was he had a country to run. At least he was running it, which is more than you can say for some people,” Sutherland told the Los Angeles Times in 2017.

“It was funny at the beginning with ‘The Hunger Games’ to walk through an airport and suddenly you feel this tug and you look down and it’s some young person – always a girl, never a boy,” Sutherland said. “And her mother is standing there and they say, ‘Could you take a photograph with my daughter?’ And we’d be standing beside each other and I’d be looking at the camera and the girl would say, ‘Could you look mean?’”

Sutherland was considered among the best actors to never receive an Academy Award nomination for any of his roles. He was married three times and had five children, including Kiefer.

Reuters, AP

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