Donald Sutherland: What were his biggest movies? ‘Hunger Games’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Ordinary People’...

Donald Sutherland, who has died at the age of 88 after a long illness, amassed nearly 200 film and TV credits over a six-decade acting career. Described by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as an “utterly unique actor and irreplaceable star”, Sutherland was never nominated for an Academy Award. However, he featured in a number of pictures that did enjoy Oscars recognition.

What are Donald Sutherland’s most memorable film roles?

Among Sutherland’s most notable roles is his turn as ‘Hawkeye’ Pierce, an army field surgeon in the 1970 Korean War comedy M*A*S*H, in which he starred alongside Elliott Gould and Tom Skerritt. “The performances have a lot to do with the movie’s success,” the legendary cinema critic Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland are two genuinely funny actors; they don’t have to make themselves ridiculous to get a laugh. They’re funny because their humor comes so directly from their personalities.” The film secured five Oscars nominations, taking home the statuette for Best Screenplay.

The following year, Sutherland appeared in the psychological thriller Klute, another movie that features prominently on his resumé. The Canadian stars as a detective who, after the disappearance of a business executive, focuses his investigation on a call girl played by Jane Fonda. The pictured earned Fonda an Academy Award for Best Actress. “The taut sense of menace and urban claustrophobia is heightened by the performances,” says the BBC’s David Wood. “Fonda won an Oscar for her part as the independent woman twisted by emotional contradictions, while Sutherland - as the morally uptight guardian confused by the notion of dependency - more than matches her for intensity.”

In 1973, Sutherland gave a memorable performance in Don’t Look Know, as one half of a married couple who travel to Venice while grieving the accidental death of their daughter. “Sutherland’s range in this movie is superb,” Bradshaw writes. “He is heartrending as the man who has to pull his young daughter’s dead body from the pond at the beginning - and deeply affecting as the husband who rebuilds his emotional and erotic relationship with his wife as they struggle to deal with their grief.”

In 1980, Sutherland again played a parent coping with the death of a child, in Robert Redford’s highly acclaimed Ordinary People. Based on Alvin Sargent’s 1976 novel of the same name, the movie centres on the disintegration of a wealthy family in Illinois - and was a big winner at the 1981 Academy Awards. It scooped four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Redford.

In JFK in 1990, Sutherland made an unforgettable cameo as X, a mysterious US Air Force colonel who has inside info on the government’s role in the Kennedy assassination. “His character appears in a single scene, opposite Kevin Costner’s Jim Garrison, and delivers a stunningly acted, almost hilariously paranoid monologue in which he raises the stakes immensely for Garrison’s investigation into Kennedy’s assassination by telling him what’s really going on,” writes Telegraph journalist Alexander Larman. Directed by Oliver Stone, JFK was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two.

Given honorary Oscar seven years ago

In recent years, Sutherland’s notable roles have included his performance in 2005′s big-screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and his appearances as President Coriolanus Snow in the hit Hunger Games franchise. Although never nominated for an Oscar, he was given an Honorary Academy Award in 2017. In 1995, he received a Primetime Emmy and a Golden Globe for the TV film Citizen X, about the capture of a serial killer in Soviet Russia. Seven years later, he picked up another Golden Globe for his performance in the HBO series Path to War, which chronicles the lead-up to the Vietnam War. In 2011, Sutherland was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“Never daunted by a role”

In a tribute posted on the social-media platform X today, Sutherland’s son Kiefer, best known as the star of the TV series 24 and Designated Survivor, wrote of his father: “I personally think [he is] one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived.”