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Donald Sutherland Was Some Kind of Movie Star
Few actors committed as ferociously. Few actors were so damned much fun to watch.
His performances as two grieving parents, in Ordinary People and Nicolas Roeg’s nonlinear horror drama Don’t Look Now, take viewers right into the heart of that specific kind of pain, which is characterized by a combination of traumatized numbness and a desperate reaching out for familiar comforts: a chance to cheer the home team at a high school swim meet, a too-quiet family dinner that ignores the fact that someone’s not there, an anxious and needy tryst. ; his silent, entirely physical performance as the tormented psychologist and would-be weather-machine technologist Wilhelm Reich in the music video for Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting”; or for that matter, his voice role on The Simpsons as Hollis Hurlbut, the head of the Springfield Historical Society in “Lisa the Iconoclast,” in which he takes what might otherwise have been a lightly ironic farce about a historian learning the truth behind a legend and turns it into the quietly heartbreaking story of a man processing the revelation that he built his professional identity on a lie, then moving on from it. You can’t look at any photo of Sutherland from any stage of his career without thinking about what an amazing beauty he had, with those haunted French-philosopher eyes, that sharp, narrow face, the slightly off-kilter way he held himself because of the way polio damaged his body as a child, and the bold, maybe heedless grooming choices that time-stamped him in the 1970s and that he continued to embrace even late in life, when he cultivated a professor-emeritus-of-painting vibe, shoulder-length hair swept back and tucked behind his ears.
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