I’ve been hesitant to write about Donald Sutherland since the news of his death crashed on the shore of the world. This modern phenomenon of folks digitally dropping their heartfelt testimonials like singles, memorializing the lost in tidy packets suitable for sharing, seem all too often to be more about them than the deceased, and — perhaps I’m wrong — aren’t especially in keeping with the spirit of Mr. Sutherland as I experienced him. I myself am not on social media, so I don’t know if he did the same thing when people died — my guess is he did a few times — he was always hard at work, Donald was, and it seems like finding excuses to announce yourself online is part of the work of actors (of everyone) these days — but I can only picture him doing it while holding his nose or at least wincing, which is how I’m doing this.
What provoked me to finally embarrass myself in this way was a clip from a 60 Minutes interview someone posted on X in which Mr. Sutherland told the story of how his mother, confronted by her son with the question, “Mother, am I good looking?”, responded: “Your face has character.” Anderson Cooper soon followed up by asking Mr. Sutherland if he thought he was ugly, and he said, '“‘Unattractive’, I think, is the gentler way to put it,” and that’s what sent me running to my computer just now, because that lilting little sentence — which carries with it, in its vocabulary, syntax, punctuation and rhythm so much information, so much implicit wryness, wisdom, humility and grace — made me miss him so much and want to be with him again, so here I am.
I’ve told a few stories elsewhere in these pages about how Mr. Sutherland stood up for me during the production of DIRTY SEXY MONEY, how he made me feel like I was part of something larger than me and that I had earned my place in that large something, fair and square: and I won’t retell them here. All I’ll say today is this: what Mr. Sutherland did with that sentence, he did with almost all the moments he existed, at least during the time I knew him. T.S. Eliot defined wit as “a stubborn intelligence masked by a lyric grace and the awareness, within any given situation, of the possibility of other situations.” Add humility and generosity to that definition and you have Mr. Sutherland as I knew him. His presence, his manner, his magnanimously high-low way of being, graciously misted everything around him with easy elegance. Even if you were as dumb as a post — and I’m speaking from experience — you felt a little smarter in Mr. Sutherland’s company, and in the aftermath of even the smallest observation on his part, a vista would open up before you, suddenly, whenever he spoke or smiled in his sneaky way, in which it was possible to imagine you saw a fun world bounded by common decency and restraint.
I’ll close by sharing four lessons I learned from Mr. Sutherland which, to my mind, express perfectly the part of him I knew. One: Denis Johnson is and was an author whose books are worth rushing out to read. Two: drink Burgundy with dinner and Bordeaux with lunch. He told me a story about someone quizzically chiding him after ordering a wine from Burgundy with lunch: “Burgundy with lunch? Don’t you find it makes you…ANGRY?” Three: when you have an upset stomach, drink a shot of Fernet Branca and chase it with some cold soda water and lime over ice. It works! Finally, the last piece of advice he ever gave me, which, with its brevity and bittersweet weight, gives you a perfect picture of the Mr. Sutherland I knew: “Eat more broccoli.”