"Your
face is your fortune" according to the old saying,
and in the case of Canadian star Donald Sutherland, an
appearance judged as lying somewhere between Gary Cooper
and a Bassett Hound is an unlikely candidate for founding
a fortune.
However, the screen charisma of the 6 foot 4 inch star
is undeniable, but the man himself, born in New Brunswick,
Canada, in 1934, credits Scotland for his success.
According to Sutherland, his looks come from his Scottish
ancestry; his full name is Donald McNichol Sutherland.
But the star himself says his acting career really began
almost 50 years ago in panto, on the boards in Perth.
He had travelled from Toronto to London, but dropped out
from the London Academy of Music and Drama after just
18 months. After that, Perth gave him his fist taste of
theatrical success. Sutherland explains, " Perth
was the first theatre I ever played where the audience
laughed when I was being funny. I spent nine months there.
I played my first panto there. I was on eight quid a week
and my wife and I lived near the Bell’s whisky distillery
and we woke up with frost on the bed. It was my first
acting job and gave me great comfort and security."
It was confidence that led him to more than 100 movies,
with some truly memorable performances that endear the
great Canadian Scot to filmgoers the world over, in films
like M*A*S*H and Don’t Look Now.
Don’t Look Now is about to be re-released
and is bound to raise the big guy’s profile once
again. Co-starring Julie Christie, it tells the tale of
a husband and wife trying to come to terms with the death
of their young daughter in a wintry Venice. Seeing it
always remains one of the most haunting of film experiences.
Yet on first release Don’t Look Now became
the centre of a fierce debate about censorship, concerning
a realistic four minute sex scene between Sutherland’s
and Christie’s characters.
American censors considered this too explicit and cut
it from the film, but the British Board Of Film Classification
decided the scene could stay, because it was tasteful
and integral to the plot.
Sutherland himself supports the actions of the British
censors. "The point about the scene is that it’s
a non-voyeuristic experience that reminds you of having
made love yourself with your beloved, and the reason why
it does that is because Nic (Director Nicholas Roeg) is
so skilful in intercutting between Julie and myself getting
dressed and making love. You dwell for only very short
increments of time on the physical relationship."
Sutherland is now the subject of a documentary for BBC
Scotland after being tracked down by presenter Mark Cousins:
"Of all the interviewees we’ve ever had Donald
was one of the most open, emotional and articulate, reacting
visibly stronger to clips than we have ever seen somebody
do before.
Among those scenes, the emotional high point where Sutherland
discovers his dead daughter in the water. Making Don’t
Look Now quite obviously changed Sutherland’s
life, but as the documentary tells, the film also almost
caused a premature end to it, when a stunt went drastically
wrong.
Sutherland took over when a stunt man was unable to stand
in for him, only for the actor to be left dangling by
a wire thread in mid-air, when the stunt went wrong. For
a time onlookers thought he would plummet to the ground
to almost certain death, though at the time he was almost
unaware of the full extent of the danger he was in.
He says: "I was lucky, but I didn’t know it
at the time. It was only years later that someone explained
the wires were twisted. One positive thing came out of
it though, -it cured my vertigo!"
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>>> archive >>>
"Your
face is your fortune" according to the old saying,
and in the case of Canadian star Donald Sutherland, an
appearance judged as lying somewhere between Gary Cooper
and a Bassett Hound is an unlikely candidate for founding
a fortune.