Donald Sutherland © Elisa Leonelli 1978
I will always remember staying up all evening on a cold outdoor set in Vancouver, Canada, waiting for a break in the filming to photograph Donald Sutherland, and his co-star Brooke Adams, who were shooting a movie titled A Man, a Woman and a Bank.
It was September 1978 and I was working on assignment for the Chicago Tribune.
It was not until midnight when I finally was able to pose the actors in front of my portable Norman 200B strobe with umbrella and capture them with my Nikon cameras. Donald was his usual playful self and Brooke borrowed one of my cameras pretending to be me photographing him.
Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams © Elisa Leonelli 1978
I photographed this incredible actor again, after an interview he gave to the journalists of the Hollywood Foreign Press, in 1980 about Ordinary People directed by Robert Redford. He said: “Bob Redford was as intelligent and observant a director as I’d ever worked with. He trained as a painter and he had a very specific picture in his head of what he wanted, he had a wonderful sense of image.”
Donald Sutherland (c) Elisa Leonelli 1980
I also photographed Sutherland in 1989 about A Dry White Season by Euzhan Palcy. I wrote a career interview for Marie Claire, Italy, published in the January 1990 issue.
Elisa Leonelli, Donald Sutherland (c) HFPA 1989
Another day I fondly remember meeting him was in New York while doing interviews about Pride & Prejudice (2005), directed by Joe Wright from the from the 1813 novel by Jane Austen. The last time was in 2013, after he started playing President Coriolanus Snow in the Hunger Games saga.
In 2014 I wrote a classic profile of Sutherland for the Golden Globes website, as part of a series that also included his friend and Klute costar Jane Fonda, plus Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Bette Davis, Olivia deHavilland, Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Henry Fonda, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Burt Lancaster, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Gregory Peck.
Elisa Leonelli, Donald Sutherland © HFPA 1980
In March 2021, in my weekly series of Archival quotes from HFPA interviews, I featured Donald Sutherland talking about the directors he worked with.
We are sad that he passed away today, at 88, but we still have his performances to remind us what a great actor Donald Sutherland was.
Here’s a few more of my favorites: Alex in Wonderland (1970) by Paul Mazursky, Don’t Look Now (1973) by Nicolas Roeg with Julie Christie, The Day of the Locust (1975) by John Schlesinger from the novel by Nathanael West, Novecento (1976) by Bernardo Bertolucci, Casanova (1976) by Federico Fellini, Without Limits (1998) by Robert Towne, The Leisure Seeker (2017) by Paolo Virzi with Helen Mirren. On television he played Nicole Kidman’s father in The Undoing (2020)
Read the Golden Globe nominee bio that I wrote for more info.
During one of the many interviews I did with Donald Sutherland, he said in 1998: “We die alone, when you crawl into that bed and you’re with yourself, you want to look back and hope it’s been worthwhile.”