Donald Sutherland was an actor of everyday depth

TCanadian actor Donald Sutherland, who died on June 20 at age 88, appeared in so many films over his long career — and was so incredible even in films that barely deserved him — that it’s impossible to find a definitive Sutherland performance. He can be infuriatingly threatening one minute, only to catch you off guard with his trembling vulnerability the next. His facial features were supple and pleasant; he could win you over in the blink of an eye with that big, elastic smile. He had a face you could trust – and that’s exactly what made him so extraordinarily moving in, say, Philip Kaufman’s great 1978 sci-fi symphony of paranoia. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Once you meet Sutherland’s character, the kind, intelligent and trustworthy Matthew Bennell, who was taken over by alien people, it was as if the sun had fallen from the sky. There are few despairing endings in the history of cinema: when Sutherland’s Matthew emits the piercing, hollow scream of the alien “doubles”, we are left with no hope for anything, ever. Once they capture Sutherland, the rest of humanity won’t stand a chance.

That’s because Sutherland reflected our best and our worst – or perhaps just our most imperfect selves – back to us. Few actors have demonstrated their gift for mixing fearlessness with such exultant good humor. His career was marked, early on, by two performances that showed us men in crisis, fathers facing pain they could barely bear, although they also felt responsible for helping their wives heal. In 1980 by Robert Redford Common people, Sutherland’s upper-middle-class patriarch, Calvin Jarrett, mourns the loss of his eldest son while trying to protect his emotionally fragile younger son (Timothy Hutton) from the cold cruelty of the boy’s mother, Mary Tyler Moore’s Beth . Seven years earlier, in Nicolas Roeg’s disturbing 1973 thriller Don’t look now, he played a husband, John Baxter, trying to reason with his wife, Laura (Julie Christie), who is desperate to contact the couple’s dead son. In both films, he plays characters who bear the burden of being reasonable, even when they have to put their own feelings aside. You could look at these performances as dual portraits of late 20th-century masculinity: Even at a time when young men felt free to break free—or at least tried to break free—the specter of real-life adult suffering couldn’t be escaped. . Sutherland, in these characters, was right in the middle of that suffering, taking responsibility for it. If young people at the time thought that becoming an adult meant the suffocating act of putting on a suit and tie, Sutherland showed us something else: that it meant facing the most challenging emotional circumstances and feeling intensely every minute. To numb is to escape.

To ease this burden, we’ve also had the pleasure of seeing his playful, mischievous side in films like Robert Altman’s 1970 confounding comedy. M*A*S*H*: As Army surgeon Hawkeye Pierce, stationed in a field hospital somewhere near the front lines during the Korean War, Sutherland radiated a bonhomie whistling in the dark. And he gave great performances even in failed films like John Schlesinger’s metaphor-laden junkyard and the black heart of Hollywood and humanity Grasshopper Day, 1975. Like Homer Simpson (the first Homer Simpson), a supernatural accountant who ends up being a victim of Hollywood’s cruelty, Sutherland resists being turned into a symbol. He could only play one person.

The list of films in which Sutherland appeared, and in which he was often great, is too long to be a cursory summary. He worked with big names, directors of all stripes: Bernardo Bertolucci, Claude Chabrol, Federico Fellini, Clint Eastwood, James Gray. But one of his best performances is the one he presents in Alan Pakula’s film Klute, as a Pennsylvania detective assigned to shadow Jane Fonda’s high-class New York call girl, Bree Daniel, with the aim of solving a missing person case. He falls in love with her and, in a classic Sutherland-esque trick of subtlety, we know it before he does. At one point, she tries to manipulate him by offering to sleep with him for free. She turns around and begins to unzip her tight black sequined dress, exposing a tantalizing patch of skin. He hesitates, even though he realizes that someone is sneaking up on the roof above, and he must take quick and silent action to protect her. Yet for a split second, as she unzips her dress, he looks almost as if he’s about to cry—there’s something tender and lost about his detective Klute, even in the midst of his devotion to duty. That’s the Sutherland touch. And he was incredibly sexy, for starters.

Even though Sutherland’s most notable roles came in the 1970s and 1980s, he also gave wonderful performances late in his career; he never just disappeared, as so many actors do. Modern audiences may know him better as President Snow in Hunger Games films. But he gave a surprising and joyful performance as Mister Bennet, father of Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth, in Joe Wright’s luminous 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. His protection of his daughter and his love for her shine like a silent star – although he also knows, as he approaches the end of his life, that he won’t always be around to ensure her happiness. Sutherland, once again, as always, made complicated human feelings seem like everyday things – probably because they are.