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Donald Sutherland, ‘Klute’ and ‘Ordinary People’ Actor, Dead at 88

Donald Sutherland, the veteran actor whose work spanned several decades, has died at age 88.

(He claimed that, because of spinal meningitis, “I died for four or five seconds.”) Sutherland studied engineering at the University of Toronto, but he developed an interest in acting, becoming involved with the student theater troupe UC Follies at Hart House Theatre before heading to London and Scotland to hone his craft. It was Sutherland’s ability to convey a common touch that served him so well in his many everyman roles — which only heightened the horror in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the hilarity of Animal House, where he played a groovy, pot-smoking professor, which came out the same year. His one-scene appearance in Oliver Stone’s jittery conspiracy thriller JFK, portraying a government man with insider information for Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison, was a highlight of that hallucinatory Oscar-winner, but he was equally sterling in the underrated 1998 Steve Prefontaine biopic Without Limits, in which his Bill Bowerman is the platonic ideal of the tough-love coach, pushing the long-distance runner to greater glory.

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