Donald McNichol Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, a coastal city in New Brunswick. Certainly one of three kids of Frederick McLae Sutherland, a salesman, and Dorothy (McNichol) Sutherland, a math instructor, Donald lived his childhood in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia.
As a boy, he was stricken by unwell 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 advised an interviewer years later, “and so they inform me that for a couple of seconds, I died.”
Mr. Sutherland went to varsities in Bridgewater, the place he labored as a disc jockey at a neighborhood 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 doable fallback.
However the appearing bug had bitten. Put up-university, he went off to review 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, every now and then, 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 Residing Lifeless,” 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 at all times forged as an inventive homicidal maniac,” Mr. Sutherland advised The Guardian in 2005. “However at the very least I used to be inventive.” His performances had been apparently inventive sufficient to attract the eye of completed filmmakers, and by 1967 he was certainly one of “The Soiled Dozen.”
