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Donald Sutherland, the beloved actor who starred in scores of films from The Dirty Dozen, MASH and Klute to Animal House and Ordinary People to Pride & Prejudice and The Hunger Games franchise and won an Emmy for Citizen X, died Thursday in Miami after a long illness. He was 88.

The 2017 Honorary Oscar recipient also is the father of Emmy-winning 24 and Designated Survivor actor Kiefer Sutherland and veteran CAA Media Finance exec Roeg Sutherland. CAA confirmed the news to Deadline.

In some of his most well-known roles, he perfected a laconic, wry and dead-serious delivery as such characters as the cool-headed amateur murder investigator John Klute, opposite Jane Fonda’s terrified, erratic call girl Bree Daniels, in Klute; as the Hawkeye Pierce in the film MASH, where he played opposite Elliott Gould’s cut-up Trapper John; and in Nicolas Reog’s Don’t Look Now as skeptical John Baxter, who does not believe the claims of wife Laura (Julie Christie) that their recently dead daughter is reaching out from the other side.

In one early change-of-pace characterization, Sutherland played a sadistic fascist in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 epic 1900, in which his character gleefully swings a child by the heels, bashing the boy’s head against a wall.

Born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Donald Sutherland amassed some 200 film and TV credits spanning more than 60 years, from guesting on episodes of 1960s series including Suspense, The Avengers, Court Martial and The Odd Man to last year’s Paramount+ drama Bass Reeves. His big break in movies came with Robert Aldrich’s star-packed 1967 World War II drama The Dirty Dozen, playing Vernon Pinkley opposite Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas and others. A hit in theaters, it remains a seminal American war movie.

His next big role was as Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 Korean War dramedy MASH. The alternatively harrowing and hilarious film earned five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, winning for Ring Lardner Jr.’s biting screenplay, and fueled the 1972-83 CBS series in which Alda Alda played Hawkeye.

Sutherland followed that with another star-laden war movie, 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, playing Sgt. Oddball alongside Clint Eastwood, Don Rickles, Savalas and others. That led to perhaps his biggest star turn, in the 1971 Alan J. Pakula crime drama Klute. He starred opposite Fonda as New York Detective John Klute, who is hired to find a chemical company executive who has disappeared. Fonda won her first Oscar for the role, and Andy Lewis & Dave Lewis were nominated for their Original Screenplay.

Sutherland’s next big movie was Nicolas Roeg’s psychological thriller Don’t Look Now, which he followed up with the 1974 international espionage comedy S*P*Y*S, reteaming with Gould, and 1975’s Hollywood-set Day of the Locust. Starring with William Atherton, Karen Black and Burgess Meredith, he played accountant Homer Simpson, who covets Black’s aspiring actress Faye Greener.

Sutherland won a Golden Globe for the television movie Path to War, an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe for his performance in the miniseries Citizen X. His extensive television credits also include The Undoing, Trust, Dirty Sexy Money, and The Pillars of the Earth, among many others.

Sutherland is survived by his wife Francine Racette; sons Roeg, Rossif, Angus, and Kiefer; daughter Rachel; and four grandchildren. A private celebration of life will be held by the family.

Mike Fleming Jr. and Greg Evans contributed to this report.

MORE TO COME…

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Legendary Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, who died on Thursday after a long illness and a celebrated Hollywood film and TV career, revealed why he never sought dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship by acquiring an American passport. “Because we don’t have the same sense of humor. It’s true. We don’t. I’m a Canadian through and through,” Sutherland told the CBC radio show Q with Tom Power in March during one of his last media interviews.

Sutherland, who had been living in recent years in Quebec, around 12 miles from the U.S. border, recalled giving that answer to an American border guard who asked why the Canadian actor, who already had a green card to work stateside, didn’t get an American passport to more quickly cross the border to complete errands.

“Anyway, I love the country. I’m very, very proud that they gave me a stamp,” Sutherland added during the radio interview that followed soon after Canada Post, the country’s mail service, in October 2023 unveiled a commemorative stamp to honor the actor’s seven-decade acting career.

In fact, Sutherland, looking back on his life, said he was most proud of the stamp as his biggest achievement. “Do you know that that goes everywhere in this country and abroad? That puts me on letters that go everywhere. I love it. I am so touched by it,” he said.

CBC’s Tom Power at one point asked Sutherland why his own postage stamp apparently mattered more to him than his film and TV career, at which point the Hollywood actor pointed to his own parents — father Frederick Sutherland and mother Dorothy McNichol.

“Well, I hadn’t achieved something that I felt my mother and my father, you know,” he said, before breaking off and recalling a scene in M.A.S.H. where he and Elliot Gould were in a jeep in Tokyo and a female officer with the U.S. Army yelled out to ask whether they wanted to say hello on camera to their mothers. “And I said, well, my mother’s passed, but I would like to say hello to my dad if that’s OK. And she said OK. So I waved at the camera and said, ‘Hi, Dad,’” Sutherland recalled of his onscreen lines.

It turned out Sutherland’s parents, then alive, watched M*A*S*H in a Las Vegas movie theater. ”And when I said ‘Hi Dad,’ my father stood up in the Las Vegas cinema and said, ‘Hi Donny.’ And my mother tried to drag him down into the seat and his suspenders were elasticized. I mean, she nearly slingshotted him through the air,” Sutherland recounted proudly.

During the radio interview, Sutherland made it a point when asked what his children thought of his own Canadian postage stamp of recounting he had never been nominated for a competitive Oscar, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made up for the oversight by giving him an honorary statuette in November 2017 at the Governors Awards.

“They loved it,” Sutherland said of his children: Kiefer Sutherland, an occasional co-star, Rossif Sutherland, Roeg Sutherland, Rachel Sutherland and Angus Sutherland. “I mean, they gave me an honorary Academy Award because I have, I’ve never been nominated.”

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