The Unlikely Leading Man Donald Sutherland

What is Donald Sutherland’s deal? He’s been acting in movies for nearly 60 years, an eternal presence who seems ingrained in the medium itself yet feels impossible to account for. Born in Canada in 1935, trained in England, he parlayed the rangy physique of a silent-movie Lincoln and the long, unmanageable face of an Expressionist caricature into a distinct form of stardom. In some freakishly unpremeditated manner, this beautiful gargoyle attained fame as an icon of hip irreverence in M*A*S*H (1970). Like his Klute (1971) co-star and anti-war comrade Jane Fonda, Sutherland is a counterculture symbol whom over the decades has become a timeless fixture on screens everywhere. Now at 87, in a career overlapping the last decades of Lillian Gish’s and the first decades of Adam Driver’s, he has become an éminence grise whose specialty is powerful, aristocratic old lions—men who seem made of money and disdain.