Who Was That Guy?

Until recently Actor Donald Sutherland was the kind of person who got overlooked at cocktail parties. The face was familiar, but then hundreds of guys are tall (6 ft. 4 in.) and skinny (185 lbs.), with blond hair, blue eyes, belled teeth, slightly bowed ears, and a resemblance to a tall pencil or a short television tower. Meanwhile, in one film after another for the past two years, Sutherland has been filling the screen with a low-key presence that has left critics grasping for adjectives and audiences grasping for his name. All that is changing, however, for he is becoming established as one of the finest talents in the cinematic youth movement.

Says Director Paul Almond: "He's so different in every role that people who have seen him several times cannot recognize him later." In Interlude, with Oskar Werner, Sutherland played a bumbling family friend; in Joanna, a fading, dying aristocrat; in The Split, a hired killer; in The Dirty Dozen, a fumbling draftee. The identity crisis will soon be overcome, however, with the release of M.A.S.H. this week and Start the Revolution Without Me next week. In M.A.S.H. he portrays a zany surgeon operating behind the lines during the Korean War, while in Revolution he doubles up on himself playing both a nobleman and a peasant, who in turn pose as their opposites. With this double bill, Sutherland will not only be remembered, but at 34 is probably on his way to becoming readily recognized by both critics and audiences.

Until his student days at the University of Toronto, Sutherland had never been inside a theater. Then he took a dare and was cast in a local production of The Male Animal. After graduating, he headed straight for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. The result was a competent but totally obscure repertory actor who lived a stereotyped hand-to-mouth existence, once in a basement for $2 a week. "It was an excellent deal," Sutherland told TIME Correspondent Jon Larsen. "I lived right next to the hot-water heater and was warmer than anyone else in the building."

Sutherland's first roles were in ghoul films (Die! Die! My Darling!, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors). "I needed the money and the experience." From the scare flicks it was a struggle to MGM's The Dirty Dozen in 1968. As one of the bottom six of the Dozen, a slack-jawed soldier with a head as impenetrable as a Government-issue helmet, Sutherland so impressed Director Robert Aldrich that he ordered up the tour-de-farce scene where Sutherland impersonates a general and inspects the troops on an American Army base.

Un-Hollywood Man. Coming up in 1970, in addition to M.A.S.H. and Start the Revolution, are two more Sutherland films. In Kelly's Warriors, a World War II farce, he portrays an oddball tank commander named Oddball. Canadian Producer-Director Almond has starred him in The Act of the Heart with Mrs. Almond, Genevieve Bujold. Although now based in Hollywood, Sutherland is very much the un-Hollywood man. Most of his clothes are hand-me-downs from his movies, and his only two luxuries are his sports cars, a Ferrari and a Lotus (on which he is still making payments). A big evening is dinner with his wife in an obscure restaurant, a movie, listening to records (anything from Mahler to The Cream) or playing with his three children.

He figures that movies are "a director's medium. It all happens in the cutting room. As an actor, you can only bring so much to a film. As a director, there is almost no limit." With that in mind, Sutherland bought himself a movie camera and spent the holidays filming his family. He has not seen the results and fears he may have used the wrong lens. But he insists: "I just know I can do it." Audiences can only hope that Director Sutherland will not rob them of Actor Sutherland.

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