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by james macgregor | 23rd March, 2001 | contact: james@netribution.co.uk

Scottish Stamp Set Sutherland for Stardom

"Your face is your fortune" according to the old saying, and in the case of Canadian star Donald Sutherland, an appearance judged as lying somewhere between Gary Cooper and a Bassett Hound is an unlikely candidate for founding a fortune.

However, the screen charisma of the 6 foot 4 inch star is undeniable, but the man himself, born in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1934, credits Scotland for his success.

According to Sutherland, his looks come from his Scottish ancestry; his full name is Donald McNichol Sutherland. But the star himself says his acting career really began almost 50 years ago in panto, on the boards in Perth.

He had travelled from Toronto to London, but dropped out from the London Academy of Music and Drama after just 18 months. After that, Perth gave him his fist taste of theatrical success. Sutherland explains, " Perth was the first theatre I ever played where the audience laughed when I was being funny. I spent nine months there. I played my first panto there. I was on eight quid a week and my wife and I lived near the Bell’s whisky distillery and we woke up with frost on the bed. It was my first acting job and gave me great comfort and security."

It was confidence that led him to more than 100 movies, with some truly memorable performances that endear the great Canadian Scot to filmgoers the world over, in films like M*A*S*H and Don’t Look Now.

Don’t Look Now is about to be re-released and is bound to raise the big guy’s profile once again. Co-starring Julie Christie, it tells the tale of a husband and wife trying to come to terms with the death of their young daughter in a wintry Venice. Seeing it always remains one of the most haunting of film experiences.

Yet on first release Don’t Look Now became the centre of a fierce debate about censorship, concerning a realistic four minute sex scene between Sutherland’s and Christie’s characters.

American censors considered this too explicit and cut it from the film, but the British Board Of Film Classification decided the scene could stay, because it was tasteful and integral to the plot.

Sutherland himself supports the actions of the British censors. "The point about the scene is that it’s a non-voyeuristic experience that reminds you of having made love yourself with your beloved, and the reason why it does that is because Nic (Director Nicholas Roeg) is so skilful in intercutting between Julie and myself getting dressed and making love. You dwell for only very short increments of time on the physical relationship."

Sutherland is now the subject of a documentary for BBC Scotland after being tracked down by presenter Mark Cousins: "Of all the interviewees we’ve ever had Donald was one of the most open, emotional and articulate, reacting visibly stronger to clips than we have ever seen somebody do before.

Among those scenes, the emotional high point where Sutherland discovers his dead daughter in the water. Making Don’t Look Now quite obviously changed Sutherland’s life, but as the documentary tells, the film also almost caused a premature end to it, when a stunt went drastically wrong.

Sutherland took over when a stunt man was unable to stand in for him, only for the actor to be left dangling by a wire thread in mid-air, when the stunt went wrong. For a time onlookers thought he would plummet to the ground to almost certain death, though at the time he was almost unaware of the full extent of the danger he was in.

He says: "I was lucky, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was only years later that someone explained the wires were twisted. One positive thing came out of it though, -it cured my vertigo!"

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