Donald Sutherland

DONALD Sutherland is intimidating. Perhaps it is his stature -- he's 6 feet 4 -- or the shock of white hair or the piercing blue eyes. Maybe it's that voice, filled with gravitas. "What are we talking about?" he asks in a businesslike manner at the outset of a recent interview. A little bit of everything. Sutherland, a fit, handsome 70, is everywhere these days.

It's perhaps something of a triumph that after years of standing in for every other place in the world, Bulgaria gets to play Bulgaria in the low-budget, Sofia-set thriller "Assassin's Bullet. " What goes unrecognizable, however, is the entertainment value in this dippy hodgepodge of hitman action, illogical romance and geopolitical commentary. Christian Slater plays a U.S. embassy envoy tasked by the American ambassador (Donald Sutherland) to investigate a series of vigilante killings of high-value terrorists.

It's perhaps something of a triumph that after years of standing in for every other place in the world, Bulgaria gets to play Bulgaria in the low-budget, Sofia-set thriller "Assassin's Bullet. " What goes unrecognizable, however, is the entertainment value in this dippy hodgepodge of hitman action, illogical romance and geopolitical commentary. Christian Slater plays a U.S. embassy envoy tasked by the American ambassador (Donald Sutherland) to investigate a series of vigilante killings of high-value terrorists.

'MASH' Donald Sutherland became a star in Robert Altman's 1970 antiwar classic as the irreverent surgeon Capt. "Hawkeye" Pierce, who, with fellow doctor "Trapper" John (Elliott Gould) heals the wounded and wounds his superiors. Kiefer Sutherland The oldest son of Sutherland began working in films in the 1980s, but hit his stride in the award-winning 2001-10 Fox action series, "24," playing the hair-triggered, take-no-prisoners, conflicted agent Jack Bauer. 'Citizen X' Donald Sutherland earned his only Emmy Award for his acclaimed 1995 HBO movie about the search for a Russian serial killer.

Donald Sutherland has a piano lesson at 6 p.m., and he is not wearing a watch. Are we in trouble here? Among the actors capable of wounding you with a withering stare for making them late, Sutherland would be right up there with the withering elite, except that the longer you are with him, the more it's plain he means you no harm and is probably not going to worry too much about the time anyway.

As he tells it, Donald Sutherland was jet-lagged and bone-tired from the high- speed shooting schedule of HBO's "Citizen X" in Budapest when the call came from Dustin Hoffman in California: We need you. "I came late, very late," he says, referring to the plea from the makers of "Outbreak" to join their cast as a general who would destroy a town in order to save the world from a hideous viral epidemic. "I gave Dustin every conceivable excuse, but he rebutted them all."

Thanks for the fine profile of Donald Sutherland ("In the Key of Very Sharp," by Sean Mitchell, April 25). He has become one of my favorite film performers, and I look forward to seeing him in "Enigma Variations." In addition to "Klute," the movie that showed me what a fine actor he is was--believe it or not--"Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Sutherland plays his angel-like character for real, and thereby gives this teen comedy a depth it would not have without him. The Annunciation scene in which his character informs Buffy of her vocation is both a hoot and a sober scene of when and where we discover who we are, what we stand for and what we can do in and for the world.

I'm married to a famous movie actor--or at least that's what a lot of people think. Every day my husband receives several fan letters addressed to Donald Sutherland. That's my husband's name, but he's an American artist, not a Canadian actor. We listed our telephone number in my name to avoid that confusion. But someone has seized upon my husband's name and address and published it in some directory for fans without checking. We do, after all, live in Los Angeles.

You name it, Donald Sutherland has had it. Polio, rheumatic fever, hepatitis, an appendectomy, pneumonia, scarlet fever. "And spinal meningitis," the actor said. "I died. . . . " A reporter chuckled. Sutherland looked perturbed. "Yes. I died. For four or five seconds," he said. Sutherland overcame the bout of meningitis and says his experience with disease since childhood left him with a deep appreciation of the medical profession.

What seems to start out as a burlesque against the rich ends up mutating into something stranger and much more ambiguous. Art dealers Louisa (Stockard Channing) and Flanders Kittredge (Donald Sutherland) are East Side elites who live out their tony lives inside the galaxies of the super-rich but they're hand-to-mouth wealthy. Suddenly, they're confronted by a young black man (Will Smith, pictured) who claims to be friends with their children at Harvard.

Donald Sutherland was as happy as a kid in a candy store when he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame two weeks ago ? right next to his "24" star son Kiefer's marker. The day after the event, the 75-year-old veteran of such films as Robert Altman's 1970 "MASH," Nicolas Roeg's 1973 "Don't Look Now," Bernardo Bertolucci's 1976 epic "1900," Federico Fellini's 1976 "Casanova" and, let us not forget, 1978's "Animal House," is still glowing. "When you get to be my age ? just think about it," says Sutherland, relaxing in his publicist's West Hollywood office.

Twenty-five things you (probably) didn't know about the Winter Games: 1 Olympic Village athletes do their own laundry. 2 To be included, a sport must be practiced in at least 25 nations. 3 Torch bearers, who paid $350 for the propane devices, were able to keep them when they were done. 4 NBC's coverage of the opening ceremony attracted 67.5 million viewers, 17 million more than the Turin Games four years ago. 5 NBC's Olympic fanfare is called "Bugler's Dream." Its conductor?

AFTER playing Kiefer Sutherland's ill-fated wife on "24" and appearing with his father, Donald Sutherland, last season on "Commander in Chief," Leslie Hope has run out of Sutherlands. Now she's just on the run, joining Donnie Wahlberg as a family on the lam in "Runaway," at 9 p.m. Mondays on the CW. Life at home in L.A. with her husband, Adam Kane, and her son isn't nearly so hectic.

DONALD Sutherland is intimidating. Perhaps it is his stature -- he's 6 feet 4 -- or the shock of white hair or the piercing blue eyes. Maybe it's that voice, filled with gravitas. "What are we talking about?" he asks in a businesslike manner at the outset of a recent interview. A little bit of everything. Sutherland, a fit, handsome 70, is everywhere these days.

Theater Donald Sutherland stars as a reclusive Nobel Prize-winning author who grants a rare interview to a small-town journalist (played by Jamey Sheridan) in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's psychological thriller "Enigma Variations," closing Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. Today and Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $29-$40. (213) 628-2772.

It's part of an actor's job, and pleasure, to keep us guessing--to make sure we can't always be sure when it comes to a character's motives, relative trustworthiness or enigmatic reasoning. Donald Sutherland has been playing enigma variations his entire career, across a wide range of sympathetic and despicable assignments.

Anyone can play a hero; all it takes is billing. But playing a really convincing villain? That's the acting job that separates the movie men from the boys. In "Benefit of the Doubt" (selected theaters), Donald Sutherland gets a chance at a classy, mean high-melodrama heavy: a killer-father, a Jekyll-Hyde good guy/maniac who alternates between menacingly restrained niceness and nicely unrestrained menace.

Agatha Christie's "Ordeal by Innocence" (citywide) is quite a few cuts above most films that open Fridays without previews, yet is not up to the best of the filmed Christie mysteries. There's just not enough bite in either adapter Alexander Stuart's dialogue or in Desmond Davis' direction.

Thanks for the fine profile of Donald Sutherland ("In the Key of Very Sharp," by Sean Mitchell, April 25). He has become one of my favorite film performers, and I look forward to seeing him in "Enigma Variations." In addition to "Klute," the movie that showed me what a fine actor he is was--believe it or not--"Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Sutherland plays his angel-like character for real, and thereby gives this teen comedy a depth it would not have without him. The Annunciation scene in which his character informs Buffy of her vocation is both a hoot and a sober scene of when and where we discover who we are, what we stand for and what we can do in and for the world.

Donald Sutherland has a piano lesson at 6 p.m., and he is not wearing a watch. Are we in trouble here? Among the actors capable of wounding you with a withering stare for making them late, Sutherland would be right up there with the withering elite, except that the longer you are with him, the more it's plain he means you no harm and is probably not going to worry too much about the time anyway.