Donald Sutherland booking

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Donald Sutherland was born to father Frederick, a salesman and head of the local bus, gas and
electric company, and mother Dorothy, a mathematics teacher. He was raised in Bridgewater, Nova
Scotia, where he went to high school. He took an early interest in the entertainment industry, working
as a radio announcer at the age of 14, for which he earned the princely sum of about 30 US cents an
hour. The pay only increased by a small amount when he got his first acting job years later, this time it
reached $US12 a week. “And I was incredibly happy,” he recalls. After receiving a rave review in the
Toronto Globe & Mail for his performance in a student production at the University of Toronto, he
decided he might be able to make a living as an actor. He graduated from a course in engineering and
drama, before setting off to England, where he applied to The London Academy of Music and
Dramatic Art (Lamda) but was told his size and idiosyncratic looks would not make winning parts easy.
However, he was accepted and worked on stage and in television there early in his career. Sutherland
then broke into film with a tiny part in the 1963 British romantic drama ‘The World Ten Times Over’. By
the time Sutherland came to Hollywood in the mid-1960s, he had to pay special attention to avoid
speaking with a British accent. In the 1970s, he began to make it as a leading man. This must have
come as a surprise to even the man himself – as a teenager, he asked his mother if he was handsome,
she hesitated and then replied, “Donald to be perfectly truthful, no. But your face has a lot of
character.” His sex symbol status improved with roles in films such as ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973), which
is still regarded as one of the most compelling thrillers, with its convoluted atmosphere of dread and
unforgettable performances from Sutherland and Julie Christie. It may have been a horror but it is wellremembered for the lovemaking scenes. It was rumoured that the pair weren’t acting at all during the
filming of the racy sequence. Sutherland has since scotched the rumours saying, “it bewilders me how
anyone could think me and Julie were doing that for real… There were at least two other people in the
room, it was Nic Roeg’s artistic vision; it’s all entirely in the editing, you don’t see anything.”
He met his first wife, Lois Hardwick, at university. She was the daughter of a child star of the silent
movies. The marriage lasted seven years and then he met Shirley Douglas, the daughter of Tommy
Douglas, a socialist politician who was the architect of Canada’s welfare state. Shirley bore him twins,
Rachel and Kiefer (named after Warren Kiefer, the pen name of Lorenzo Sabatini, who directed
‘Castle of the Living Dead’ in which Sutherland made his film debut), and pursued radical politics – she
was once arrested for raising money to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers. The marriage
ended but not before his three-year-long affair with Jane Fonda had already begun. It was a fiery
union, at the height of Fonda’s Hanoi Jane days. After starring alongside her in the murder mystery
‘Klute’ (1971), he then joined her for a world-wide tour of anti-Vietnam war stage shows. The
performances, often held near US military bases for crowds packed with US soldiers, featured other
Hollywood liberals and were filmed as F.T.A., a then-common acronym for ‘Fuck The Army’. Not
surprisingly, as the war raged, the film was not widely screened in America and even decades later it
is almost impossible to find. “We got together shortly before we made Klute and then we were together
until the relationship exploded and fell apart in Tokyo,”he says. “And it broke my heart. I was
eviscerated. I was so sad. It was a wonderful relationship right up to the point we lived together.”
In 1972, he met the French-Canadian actress Francine Racette, to whom he is still married. Theirs has
been one of the most enduring marriages in Hollywood. They had three sons – Roeg, named after the
director Nicholas Roeg, Rossif, after French director Frederic Rossif, and Angus Redford, after Robert
Redford. Sutherland often speaks about his children and is very proud of all of them. Five of his
children work in the movies in some shape or form, including his son by his second wife, Kiefer
Sutherland, better known these days as Jack Bauer in ’24′. “Offspring are strange and complicated
beings,”he says. “I’ve been incredibly fortunate. If there is a wealth that I’ve had in my life freely, truly
it’s my five children.” Donald has worked with cinematic greats including Federico Fellini, Bernardo
Bertolucci, Robert Altman, However, at least one of those greats describes him in less than endearing
terms. “He’s a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator,”Federico Fellini once said when
asked why Sutherland was his perfect choice for the title role of ‘Casanova’ (1976).