Donald Sutherland, the prolific Canadian actor who roared to fame in the irreverent antiwar classic “MASH” and captivated audiences with his dramatic performances in films such as “Ordinary People” and “Don’t Look Now,” has died.
A mainstay of Hollywood for more than six decades, Sutherland died Thursday in Miami after a long illness, his agency confirmed in a statement. He was 88.
Son Kiefer Sutherland also confirmed his father’s death “with a heavy heart” in a statement Thursday morning on social media. “I personally think 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.”
Donald Sutherland’s body of work showcased his transformative range, shifting comfortably from drama to comedy and bouncing between heavier and lighter roles with ease. Tall at 6-foot-4 with shock white hair and piercing blue eyes, he was difficult to miss whether he was playing a zany oddball, an icy tyrant or a sadistic villain. In all, he had nearly 200 film or television roles.
“It’s characters who make pictures,” he told The Times in 1995. “Essentially my job is to provide information about them.”
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Deep in his career, as he shifted between leading and character parts, Sutherland thrived in smaller roles that ordinarily called for an older actor who’d long ago been typecast as a villain or a kooky sidekick. But Sutherland had the winning ability to transform those small roles into complex characters who often helped elevate the film.
On the small screen, Sutherland also appeared in “Human Trafficking,” “Commander in Chief,” “Dirty Sexy Money,” “Pillars of the Earth” and “Trust.” Though he originally intended to be a theatrical actor, his only Broadway appearance was in Edward Albee’s short-lived adaptation of “Lolita” in 1981.
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in St. John, a small fishing village in New Brunswick, Canada, on July 17, 1935. The town had only 5,000 residents, he said, and “that was when the train rolled into town.” One of four children, his mother was a mathematician and his father a salesman.
Initially, he planned to be an engineer and attended Victoria College in Toronto, where he earned a degree in engineering and drama. It was also where he met his first wife, Lois Hardwick. His love of acting began in a Nova Scotia movie theater when he was a teen, but movie-acting seemed too lofty a pursuit, so he tried his luck in theater instead.
“It’s not that theater was my first love. My first love was just to be an actor,” he told The Times. “I was kind of dumb and cowish, and I didn’t think movies were something I could ever be part of. I don’t know why I presumed that the theater would be. It was more ordinary, I suppose.”
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He moved to England in 1956 to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art but dropped out after nine months because he disliked its psychological approach to acting. He went on to tour with various repertory companies and appeared in several BBC television productions, including bit parts in “The Saint” and “The Avengers.”
Rejection became all-too familiar. When he tried to break onto the big screen in 1962, he came away thinking his audition had gone well. The next morning the director phoned him. “The role we’re casting is that of a guy who lives next door,” the director said. “You don’t look like you’ve ever lived next door to anyone.”
He finally made his first movie, “The Castle of the Living Dead,” in 1964 and followed it with a series of undistinguished films such as “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” and “Die! Die! My Darling!” His break came when he arrived in Hollywood in 1967, a year after his first marriage ended, to co-star in the 1968 thriller “The Split.”
“We had no money,” said Sutherland, who by then was married to his second wife, actress Shirley Douglas. (They divorced in 1970.) So he called his “Oedipus the King” co-star Christopher Plummer of “Sound of Music” fame, who was working in Stratford, Canada, to get his input.
“I woke him up,” Sutherland told The Times in 2011. “He loaned me $1,500. Incredible. We were on a Boeing 707 — Shirley, her son Tom. Kiefer and [his twin] Rachel were probably 3 or 4 months old. I had a raincoat on and I was holding Kiefer, and when we landed in Los Angeles, he threw up all over me.”
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Donald Sutherland and son Kiefer Sutherland photographed in 2016.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
The actor used a clip of his appearance on “The Saint” to land a role in his first major American film, “The Dirty Dozen,” in 1967. Sutherland credited legendary producer Ingo Preminger and director Robert Aldrich, who oversaw the 1967 World War II flick, for landing his later role in the film “MASH.”
“I was a glorified extra” in “The Dirty Dozen,” Sutherland said. “They hired legitimate actors to play the bottom six of the dozen.”
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But he quickly rose to fame in 1970 as the cocky surgeon Capt. Hawkeye Pierce in “MASH” and then as the neurotic platoon commander Oddball in “Kelly’s Heroes.” He went on to appear in such seminal films as Alan J. Pakula’s mystery “Klute,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic “1900” and Federico Fellini’s “Casanova.”
The plum roles continued to roll in with “The Eagle Has Landed,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The Day of the Locust,” and the 1973 occult thriller “Don’t Look Now,” which stirred controversy for a sex scene with Sutherland and Julie Christie that was unusually graphic for its time.
After being a leading man through most of the 1970s, Sutherland began alternating between leading roles in films such as “A Dry White Season” with Marlon Brando and Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning “Ordinary People” and character roles in films such as “JFK” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
He also appeared in lesser films that, nonetheless, became cult favorites, such as National Lampoon’s “Animal House,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
His turn as the villainous leader President Coriolanus Snow opposite Jennifer Lawrence in the blockbuster “Hunger Games” trilogy gave him a new wave of recognition with younger audiences.
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“It was funny,” Sutherland told The Times in 2017, “at the beginning with ‘The Hunger Games,’ to walk through an airport and suddenly you feel this tug and you look down and it’s some young person — always a girl, never a boy. And her mother is standing there and they say, ‘Could you take a photograph with my daughter?’ And we’d be standing beside each other and I’d be looking at the camera and the girl would say, ‘Could you look mean?’ ”
Despite his lengthy resume, Sutherland had a dearth of accolades, winning but a few major acting awards for his performances — an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the 1995 miniseries “Citizen X” and another Globe for 2002’s “Path to War.” But the lack of award season hardware didn’t seem to trouble him.
“My career has been all downhill since the age of 11. I did my first play, ‘The Male Animal,’ at Toronto University’s Hart House theater. The audience laughed and applauded when I came on, they applauded when I went off, and they applauded when I came on again. I’ve never had it as good since,” he said.
In 2017 he was given an honorary Oscar, which recognizes extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement and exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences.
The actor’s short-lived romance with Jane Fonda after making “Klute” in 1971 introduced him to left-wing politics and a second career as a hard-charging activist. The two had met at a Black Panther Party benefit in Los Angeles where he voiced his opposition of the Vietnam War. Sutherland, Fonda and other antiwar activists went on to form the Free Theatre Associates as an alternative to Bob Hope’s USO tours in Vietnam. Documents declassified in 2017 revealed the CIA had placed him on a watch list because of his antiwar activities.
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Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore star in the 1980 film “Ordinary People,” which was directed by Robert Redford.
(Paramount Studios)
Watching his father’s seminal films was a revelation for Kiefer Sutherland, who came to appreciate his father’s body of work as a teenager. “I knew he was a famous actor, but I didn’t know how prolific he was. I didn’t know how diverse all of those characters were.”
The younger Sutherland, best known for his leading role in the television drama “24,” said he even called his father to apologize for not knowing the magnitude of his career.
The two Sutherlands both appeared in Joel Schumacher’s 1996 thriller “A Time to Kill,” but they did not share any scenes. That changed when they played an estranged father and son in the western “Forsaken” in 2015.
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Sutherland said he generally didn’t watch his films after they were released, but when he did, he said he noticed room for improvement.
“I have to be truthful — I am still looking forward when I look back. All I see are mistakes,” he told The Times. “When you are working on a picture, all of your concentration, all of your intensity is directed toward the heart of it, to such a degree it burns inside of you. Then after it’s over, it’s gone.”
Sutherland is survived by wife Francine Racette; sons Roeg, Rossif, Angus and Kiefer; daughter Rachel, and four grandchildren, including “Veep” actress Sarah Sutherland.
It’s nothing new or extraordinary to remake a foreign TV show for a different country.
“All in the Family” was modeled on the British series “Till Death Us Do Part,” as “Steptoe and Son” became “Sanford and Son.” The popular CBS sitcom “Ghosts” comes from the show you can find retitled as “U.K. Ghosts” on American Netflix. The British mysteries “Professor T” and “Patience” (from Belgian and Franco-Belgian productions, respectively), have been successful on PBS. And there is, of course, “The Office,” which outlasted its original by many, many seasons and nearly 200 episodes. It doesn’t always work out (“Life on Mars”; “Viva Laughlin,” from “Blackpool,” which lasted a single episode despite starring Hugh Jackman; “Payne” and “Amanda’s,” two failed stabs at adapting “Fawlty Towers”), but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the practice.
The new Fox series “Best Medicine,” arriving Sunday as an advance premiere before its time slot premiere on Tuesdays, remakes the U.K. “Doc Martin,” previously adapted in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. For better or worse, I have a long, admiring relationship with the original, having signed on early and attended every season in turn — and interviewed star Martin Clunes three times across the run of the series (10 seasons from 2004 to 2022). And I am surely not alone. Unlike with most such remakes, whose models may be relatively obscure to the local audience, “Doc Martin” has long been widely available here; you can find it currently on PBS, Acorn TV and Prime Video, among other platforms — and I recommend that you do.
In “Doc Martin,” Clunes played a brilliant London surgeon who develops a blood phobia and becomes a general practitioner in the Cornwall fishing village where he spent summers as a child. He’s a terse, stiff, antisocial — or, more precisely, non-social — person who doesn’t stand on ceremony or suffer fools gladly, but who time and again saves the people of Portwenn from life-threatening conditions and accidents or, often, their own foolishness. A slow-developing, on-again, off-again love-and-marriage arc with schoolteacher Louisa Glasson, played by the divine Caroline Catz, made every season finale a cliffhanger.
Obviously, the fair thing would be to take “Best Medicine” as completely new. But assuming that some reading this will want to know how it follows, differs from or compares to the original — which was certainly the first thing on my mind — let us count the ways.
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Josh Segarra, Josh Charles and Abigail Spencer in “Best Medicine.”
(Francisco Roman/FOX)
The names have mostly not been changed. For no clear reason — numerology, maybe? — Martin Ellingham is now Martin Best (Josh Charles); Aunt Joan is Aunt Sarah (Annie Potts), a fisherwoman instead of a farmer. Sally Tishell, the pharmacist in a neck brace, has become Sally Mylow (Clea Lewis); and distracted receptionist Elaine Denham has been rechristened Elaine Denton (Cree). Keeping their full names are Louisa Gavin (Abigail Spencer), father and son handymen Bert (John DiMaggio) and Al Large (Carter Shimp), and peace officer Mark Mylow (Josh Segarra). Portwenn has become Port Wenn, Maine. (Lobsters are once again on the menu.)
As in the original, Martin is hounded by dogs (no pun intended, seriously), to his displeasure; teenagers are rude to him, because they are rude teenagers. Mark Mylow is now Louisa’s recently jilted ex-fiance. Liz Tuccillo, who developed the adaptation, has added a gay couple, George (Jason Veasey) and Greg (Stephen Spinella), who run the local eatery and inn and have a pet pig named Brisket (sensitive of them not to name it Back Ribs); and Glendon Ross (Patch Darragh), a well-to-do blowhard who bullied Martin in his youth. Apart from the leads Charles and Spencer, few have much to do other than strike a quirky pose, though Segarra, recently familiar as school district representative Manny Rivera on “Abbott Elementary,” makes a meal of Mark’s every line, and Cree, who gets a lot of scenes and a personal plotline, makes a charming impression. Spencer is good company; Potts, whom I am always happy to see, is more an instrument of exposition than a full-blown character, and it feels a little unfair.
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The first episode is modeled closely on the “Doc Martin” pilot, from Martin and Louisa’s antagonistic meet cute — in which he offends her, leaning in unannounced to examine her eye — to the episode’s main medical mystery (gynecomastia), a punch in the nose for our hero. Other details and plotlines will arrive, but there has been an attempt to give “Best Medicine” its own identity and original stories.
On the whole, it’s cuter, milder, more cuddly (multiple vomit jokes notwithstanding), more obvious and more whimsical, but less real, less intense and less sharply written than “Doc Martin.” The edges and angles have been sanded down and polished; tonally, it resembles “Northern Exposure” more than the show it’s adapting. Port Wenn (represented by the coincidentally named Cornwall, N.Y., with a wide part of the Hudson River subbing for the Atlantic Ocean) itself comes across as comparatively upscale; the doctor’s office and quarters are here plushly appointed, rather than spare, functional and a little shopworn.
As Martin, Charles stiffens himself and keeps his facial expressions generally between neutral and annoyed, though he’s softer than Clunes, less a prisoner of his own body, less abrasive, less otherworldly. Where Dr. Ellingham remained to a large degree inexplicable — the series expressly refused to diagnose him — Tuccillo has given Dr. Best a quickly revealed childhood trauma to account for his blood phobia and make him more conventionally sympathetic.
I freely admit that in judging “Best Medicine,” my familiarity with “Doc Martin” puts me at a disadvantage — or an advantage, I suppose, depending on how you look at it. But taken on its own merits it strikes me as a rather obvious, perfectly ordinary example of a sort of show we’ve often seen before, a feel-good celebration of small town values and traditions and togetherness that will presumably improve the personality of its oddball new resident, as the townspeople come to accept or tolerate him anyway in turn. In the first four episodes, we get a celebration of baked beans, a town-consuming baseball championship and a once-a-year day when the women of Port Wenn doll themselves off and go out into the woods to meet a jacked, shirtless, off-the-grid he-man, right off the cover of a romance novel, who steps out of the forest, ostensibly to provide wilderness training. It’s like that.
All in all, “Best Medicine” lives very much in a television reality, rather than creating a reality that just happens to be on television. To be sure, some will prefer the former to the latter.
The Tiger Is the Tank. Or rather, the type of German tank that gives the film its international title—just in case anyone might confuse this war story with an adventure movie involving wild animals. The tank itself is the film’s container, much as The Boat was in the legendary 1981 film it openly seeks to emulate in more than one respect, or as the more recent tank was in the Israeli film Lebanon (2009). Yes, much of Dennis Gansel’s movie unfolds inside a tank called Tiger, but what it is ultimately trying to tell goes well beyond its cramped metal walls.
This large-scale Prime Video war production has been described by many as the platform’s answer to Netflix’s success with All Quiet on the Western Front, the highly decorated German film released in 2022. In practice, it is a very different proposition. Despite the fanfare surrounding its release—Amazon even gave it a theatrical run a few months ago, something it rarely does—the film made a far more modest impact. Watching it, the reasons become clear. This is a darker, stranger movie, one that flirts as much with horror as with monotony, and that positions itself less as a traditional war film than as an ethical and philosophical meditation on warfare.
The first section—an intense and technically impressive combat sequence—takes place during what would later be known as the Battle of the Dnieper, which unfolded over several months in 1943 on the Eastern Front, as Soviet forces pushed back the Nazi advance. Der Tiger is the type of tank carrying a compact platoon—played by David Schütter, Laurence Rupp, Leonard Kunz, Sebastian Urzendowsky, and Yoran Leicher—that miraculously survives the aerial destruction of a bridge over the river.
Soon afterward—or so it seems—the group is assigned a mission that, at least in its initial setup, recalls Saving Private Ryan. Lieutenant Gerkens (Schütter) is ordered to rescue Colonel Von Harnenburg, stranded behind enemy lines. From there, the film becomes a journey through an infernal landscape of ruined cities, corpses, forests, and fog—a setting that, thanks to the way it is shot, feels more fantastical than realistic.
That choice is no accident. As the journey begins to echo Apocalypse Now, it becomes clear that the film is less interested in conventional suspense—mines on the road, the threat of ambush—than in the strangeness of its situations and environments. When the tank plunges into the water and briefly operates like a submarine, one may reasonably wonder whether such technology actually existed in the 1940s, or whether the film has deliberately drifted into a more extravagant, symbolic territory.
This is the kind of film whose ending is likely to inspire more frustration than affection. Though heavily foreshadowed, it is the sort of conclusion that tends to irritate audiences: cryptic, somewhat open-ended, and more suggestive than explicit. That makes sense, given that the film is less concerned with depicting the daily mechanics of war than with grappling with its aftermath—ethical, moral, psychological, and physical.
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In its own way, The Tank functions as a kind of mea culpa. The platoon becomes a microcosm of a nation that “followed orders” and committed—or allowed to be committed—horrific acts in its name. The flashbacks scattered throughout the film make this point unmistakably clear. The problem is that, while these ideas may sound compelling when summarized in a few sentences (or in a review), the film never manages to turn them into something fully alive—narratively, visually, or dramatically.
Only in brief moments—largely thanks to Gerkens’s perpetually worried, anguished expression—do those ideas achieve genuine cinematic weight. They are not enough, however, to sustain a two-hour runtime that increasingly feels repetitive and inert. Unlike the films by Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Petersen, Francis Ford Coppola, and others it so clearly references, The Tank remains closer to a concept than to a drama, more an intriguing reflection than a truly effective film.
Will Smith and his company Treyball Studios Management Inc. are being sued by an electric violinist who is claiming wrongful termination, retaliation and sexual harassment — allegations denied by the actor-rapper-producer in a statement from his attorney.
Brian King Joseph alleges in a lawsuit filed earlier this week that Smith hired him to perform on the 2025 Based on a True Story tour, then fired him before the tour began in earnest in Europe and the U.K.
Joseph, who finished third in Season 13 of “America’s Got Talent,” went onto Instagram in the days before filing his lawsuit and posted a Dec. 27 video saying that he had been hired for “a major, major tour with somebody who is huge in the industry” but “some things happened” that he couldn’t discuss because it was a legal matter.
Electric violinist Brian King Joseph, seen performing at an awards show last October, is suing for wrongful termination, retaliation and sexual harassment.
(Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images for Media Access Awards)
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But, he said, “Getting fired or getting blamed or shamed or threatened or anything like that, simply for reporting sexual misconduct or safety threats at work, is not OK. And I know that there’s a lot of other people out there who have been afraid to speak up, and I understand. If that’s you, I see you. … More updates to come soon.”
In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court and reviewed by The Times, Joseph alleges that he and Smith struck up a professional relationship in November 2024, after which Joseph performed at two of Smith’s shows in San Diego and was invited to perform on several tracks for Smith’s “Based on a True Story” album, which was released March 28.
After the performances in San Diego, Joseph posted video of a show on Instagram with the caption, “What an honor to share the stage with such legends and a dream team of musicians. From playing in the streets to sharing my music on stages like this, this journey has been nothing short of magic — and this is just the beginning. Grateful beyond words for every single person who made this possible.”
While working on the album, the lawsuit alleges, “Smith and [Joseph] began spending additional time alone, with Smith even telling [Joseph] that ‘You and I have such a special connection, that I don’t have with anyone else,’ and other similar expressions indicating his closeness to [Joseph].”
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Joseph soon joined Smith and crew for a performance in Las Vegas, the lawsuit says — on March 20 at the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay — with Smith’s team booking rooms for everyone involved. Joseph left his bag, which contained his room key, in a van that took performers to rehearsal, and then the bag went missing for a couple of hours after he requested someone get it for him, the suit says.
When Joseph returned to his room late that night, according to the complaint, he found evidence that someone had entered his room without his permission.
“The evidence included a handwritten note addressed to Plaintiff by name, which read ‘Brian, I’ll be back no later [sic] 5:30, just us (drawn heart), Stone F.,’” the document says. “Among the remaining belongings were wipes, a beer bottle, a red backpack, a bottle of HIV medication with another individual’s name, an earring, and hospital discharge paperwork belonging to a person unbeknownst to Plaintiff.”
Joseph worried that “an unknown individual would soon return to his room to engage in sexual acts” with him, the complaint says.
It adds that Joseph, “concerned for his safety and the safety of his fellow performers and crew,” alerted hotel security and representatives for Treyball and Smith, took pictures, requested a new room and reported the incident to police using a non-emergency line. Hotel security found no signs of forced entry, and Joseph flew home the next day.
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Several days later, rather than being called on to join the next part of the tour, a Treyball representative told him the tour was “going in a different direction,” the lawsuit says, and that his services were no longer needed. The representative “redirected the blame for the termination onto [Joseph], replying, ‘I don’t know, you tell me, because everyone is telling me that what happened to you is a lie, nothing happened, and you made the whole thing up. So, tell me, why did you lie and make this up?’ [Joseph], shocked at the accusation, had nothing further to say,” as he believed the reports and evidence from Las Vegas spoke for themselves.
Joseph alleges in the lawsuit that as a result of events in Las Vegas and in the days immediately afterward, he suffered severe emotional distress, economic loss and harm to his reputation. He also alleges that the stress of losing the job caused his health to deteriorate and that he suffered PTSD and other mental illness after the termination.
“The facts strongly suggest that Defendant Willard Carroll Smith II was deliberately grooming and priming Mr. Joseph for further sexual exploitation,” the lawsuit alleges. “The sequence of events, Smith’s prior statements to Plaintiff, and the circumstances of the hotel intrusion all point to a pattern of predatory behavior rather than an isolated incident.”
The Times was unable to reach publicists or a lawyer for Will Smith because of the holiday. However, Smith attorney Allen B. Grodsky told Fox News on Thursday that “Mr. Joseph’s allegations concerning my client are false, baseless and reckless. They are categorically denied, and we will use all legal means available to address these claims and to ensure that the truth is brought to light.”
Joseph’s attorney, Jonathan J. Delshad, recently filed sexual assault civil suits against Tyler Perry on behalf of actors who say they were not hired for future work by the billionaire movie and TV producer after they rejected his alleged advances.
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Joseph is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and payment of attorney fees in an amount to be determined at trial.
The Based on a True Story tour played 26 dates in Europe and the U.K. last summer. Nine of the acts were headlining gigs, while the rest were festivals.
