What’s often overlooked in stories of the acclaimed actor’s life is how he really became a Quebecer. He died Thursday at 88.
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Donald Sutherland appeared to want to talk about anything other than his film career.
It was May 2005 and I was sitting in the cafeteria of a Verdun school that was being used as the lunch room for the TV production Human Trafficking, talking to Sutherland and his old friend Terry Haig. Sutherland played a senior agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the mini-series about the global sex trade, a show produced by Montreal’s Muse Entertainment. It also stars Mira Sorvino and Robert Carlyle.
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Sutherland, one of Canada’s most acclaimed actors, died Thursday in Florida at age 88.
Haig is best-known as a local sports journalist with a big focus on baseball, and he still occasionally pops up on Mitch Melnick’s drive show on TSN 690. But he’s also an actor and he had a small role in Human Trafficking.
Sutherland and I had a lengthy chat that day about “city politics” in Georgeville, the bucolic village on the eastern shores of mighty Lake Memphremagog where Sutherland had lived since the late 1970s. Haig’s family also had a home there, right across Magoon Point Rd. from Sutherland’s residence. I also had spent many summers there, often playing tennis with Haig at the single court in the park beside the general store.
Sutherland then began telling me how he thought the Ritz-Carlton is one of the world’s great hotels. The producers had initially booked him into one of those trendy Old Montreal boutique hotels, but Sutherland was having none of that and high-tailed it to the Ritz after two days. Conversation then segued naturally enough to baseball, and the world’s most famous Expos fan surprised me by saying he wasn’t that upset when the Expos left town. That’s because he’d already soured on the team several years earlier.
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“(Former Expos owner) Claude Brochu so alienated them from me,” Sutherland said. “When (original Expos owner) Charles Bronfman was there, it was wonderful for me. I loved Charles and I loved being there. But Brochu wasn’t a baseball man. He was just an opportunist.”
That’s vintage Sutherland. He always called it like it was even if doing so might ruffle some feathers. He never played the Hollywood game. He cared about acting and working with great directors, not glamour and stardom. Look at his most famous movies. They’re all auteur films and feature unforgettable performances by Sutherland. That list includes M*A*S*H, Klute, 1900, Ordinary People and Fellini’s Casanova.
Baseball and the Expos was just as much of a passion for him as acting. He was a regular at Expos games for decades and when we met a few years after Human Trafficking — I honestly can’t remember where and when exactly — he told me how even he knew what an obsessive fan he was. He said when at an Expos game, his friends would ask if he wanted a hot dog and he’d get angry at them because they were taking him away from the game for a second or two.
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At that second meeting, I somehow ended up recounting to him the plot of the 2005 baseball-themed movie Fever Pitch and how the Jimmy Fallon character, a crazed Boston Red Socks fan, finally sees the light and tells everyone, “It’s just a game.” When he heard that, Sutherland replied with some intensity: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” And, of course, he’s absolutely right. Just ask any Canadiens fan. It’s not just a game. It’s life. And death.
Sutherland was born in Saint John, N.B., and lived with his family in rural King’s County until the age of 12, when he moved to Bridgewater, N.S. He went to university in Toronto and then headed to England to study acting, which is where his career began. But what’s often overlooked in stories of Sutherland’s life is how he really became a Quebecer.
He met the Franco-Québécois actor Francine Racette on the set of the Canadian movie Alien Thunder in 1972 and they had been together ever since, finally officially marrying in 1990. Since 1977, they’ve had a home in Georgeville, which had been his main pad when he wasn’t travelling the world filming.
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Haig and Sutherland first met in Georgeville in 1985.
“I was an out-of-work actor in New York at that time and had come up to visit my mother for the summer,” Haig said. “And there was something over at the community hall and she’d already made friends with Donald. She said, ‘Donald, Donald, come and meet my son.’ I was like ‘holy smokes.’ I was a waiter, he was a superstar. But he was great, and that’s when we discovered that we both loved baseball. Then we started driving to Montreal for games. And that’s when we became friends, over the Expos.”
Haig recalled with wonder just how seriously Sutherland took his craft.
“It wasn’t important who he was, what was important to him was the work,” Haig said. “Have you seen 1900 by (Bernardo) Bertolucci? His character is the scariest character I think I’ve ever seen on film. He was a brilliant actor. That’s what Donald did. He stripped away everything. There was no artifice in his acting. As crazy as Oddball is (in Kelly’s Heroes) to the Ordinary People guy to the guy in 1900 to Casanova. You always walked away feeling that character. He was brilliant. I don’t think there was anyone better. He had a fast ball. He’s a major-leaguer man. And he never mailed anything in.”
And as my meeting with him on a Verdun film set in 2005 underlined, he was an open, generous unpretentious dude happy to talk baseball with a journalist.
“He hung on to who he was all through it all,” Haig said. “Maybe that’s what makes him so Canadian.”
bkelly@postmedia.com
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