Donald Sutherland

Canadian character actor, lanky with piercing blue eyes and a raspy voice, whose film career spanned over seven decades. Sutherland received numerous accolades, including a Primetime Emmy Award, and two Golden Globe Awards. He is cited as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination, but received an Academy Honorary Award in 2017.

Sutherland grew up in the Canadian Maritimes, the son of a gifted salesman father and a mathematician mother. One of five kids, he worked as a DJ in Nova Scotia at age 14 and after graduating from high school, attended The University of Toronto to study engineering, supporting himself by odd jobs and performing with local theater companies. Informing his father that he wanted to be an actor, (Dad did not discourage him), Sutherland was accepted to The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London in 1950. Following lengthy tours of the provinces, he moved back to London to do TV work and then straight into his first film, The Castle of the Living Dead in 1965. After B movies in the late '60s such as Die! Die! My Darling, it was his performance of Hawkeye Pierce in the classic M*A*S*H in 1970 that served as the final launching pad for his career. Since then the 1.93 m (6'4"), actor worked steadily.

An anti-Vietnam War activist, he formed "Free Theatre Associates" with Jane Fonda as an alternative to Bob Hope's USO tours. He and Fonda had become friends when they co-starred in the award-winning film, Klute.

He appeared in over 84 films including Klute (1971), JFK (1991), Six Degrees of Separation (1993), Instinct (1999), Space Cowboys (2000), The Italian Job (2003), Cold Mountain (2003), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Aurora Borealis (2006) and The Hunger Games franchise (2012–2015).

He was the winner of an Emmy Award for Citizen X (1995).

Sutherland suffered from ill health, as he had pneumatic fever, polio, hepatitis, an appendectomy, scarlet fever and pneumonia.