Donald Sutherland
Born: July 17th 1934
Where: New Brunswick, Canada
The gaunt actor is probably best known to cinema audiences for Nic Roeg's spineshredding chiller Don't Look Now.
Speculation still rages whether "they did it" during his love scene with Julie Christie in the 1973 movie.
Other highlighs in a career spanning more than 100 movies include The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, Klute and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
He acquired British repertory stage experience and acted in several 60s horror films before winning his first plaudits as the flamboyant aristocrat in Joanna in 1968.
Sutherland solidified his position as a vaguely off-centre lead with his irreverent surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman's breakthrough feature "M*A*S*H in 1970.
Since the 80s, the actor has often played rather glum fathers, authority figures or colorful villains.
Sutherland made the transition from anti-hero character parts (The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes to anti-hero leads in the early 70s.
Landmark performances include the reserved detective, Klute, opposite Jane Fonda (with whom he co-wrote, co-produced and co-starred in the 1972 anti-war film, "F.T.A").
He also starred in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun and famously as a doomed, death-obsessed parent in Roeg's eerie Don't Look Now.
He was the concerned father in Robert Redford's Ordinary People in 1980)and was also memorable, if controversially cast, as Fellini's Casanova.
He went on to bring a nearly palpable sense of paranoia and alienation to Philip Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978.
While he has remained a prolific actor into the 90s, few of the actor's later roles have matched his earlier successes.
His professionalism, though. has continued to manifest itself while he has become a familiar small screen presence acting in high-toned TV-movies.
In 1990, he appeared in the anti-apartheid movie A Dry White Season and portrayed Colonel X in Oliver Stone's JFK.
Backdraft allowed him a villainous turn as a pyromaniac and he was also mentor to Kristy Swanson's Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1992.
He offered a memorable turn as a high-class art dealer living an insecure lifestyle in Six Degrees of Separation.
Sutherland went on to offer two superb but quite different portraits of mentors: he was the veteran attorney who aides a younger lawyer in A Time to Kill and track coach Bill Bowerman in Without Limits.
He sent himself up in Space Cowboys, hunted big game in Instinct and dodged disease with Jamie Lee Curtis in Virus.
Recent work has included little more than broad cameos in the remake of The Italian Job and Anthony Mighella's Cold Mountain.
Howeever, he did win plaudits as the wry Mr Bennett in the 2005 big screen adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice.
