Donald McNichol Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, a coastal city in New Brunswick. Considered one of three kids of Frederick McLae Sutherland, a salesman, and Dorothy (McNichol) Sutherland, a math instructor, Donald lived his adolescence in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia.
As a boy, he was stricken by in poor health well being, together with bouts of hepatitis, rheumatic fever and polio, which left him with one leg shorter than the opposite. In 1970, whereas filming “Kelly’s Heroes” in Yugoslavia, he got here down with spinal meningitis. “I went right into a coma,” he informed an interviewer years later, “and so they inform me that for just a few seconds, I died.”
Mr. Sutherland went to varsities in Bridgewater, the place he labored as a disc jockey at an area radio station at age 14. He then attended the College of Toronto, graduating in 1956 as an English main after having switched from engineering, a discipline that his father had urged on him as a potential fallback.
However the performing bug had bitten. Put up-university, he went off to check on the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Artwork, however he dropped out after a yr in favor of precise stage work. His apprenticeship was with provincial repertory corporations in England, sprinkled with bit elements on the London stage and, from time to time, British tv.
He caught the attention of an Italian movie producer and director, Luciano Ricci, who forged him in a 1964 film, “Il Castello dei Morti Vivi” — “Fortress of the Dwelling Useless,” directed by Warren Kiefer. It was adopted in 1965 by works with unprepossessing titles like “Dr. Terror’s Home of Horrors” and “Die! Die! My Darling!”
“I used to be all the time forged as an inventive homicidal maniac,” Mr. Sutherland informed The Guardian in 2005. “However no less than I used to be inventive.” His performances have been apparently inventive sufficient to attract the eye of achieved filmmakers, and by 1967 he was one in every of “The Soiled Dozen.”
