Playboy Interview: Donald Sutherland

When the 1980 Academy Award nominations were announced last February, one name was conspicuously absent from the Best Actor category: Donald Sutherland, the star of "Ordinary People," the performer whose sensitive portrayal of Calvin Jarrett had brought to life the pain and stress of a very real American father. Sutherland, a veteran of more than 40 films, shrugged the insult off philosophically: He didn't tend to get awards for his work; besides, he wasn't going to worry--too many other things were going right in his life. Indeed, at 46, Sutherland seems to be an actor coming into his own. His films have become big hits with the public. Since "Ordinary People," he has completed "Gas," "Eye of the Needle" and "Threshold." Audiences seem to relate to Sutherland--they like his flexibility, his lanky looks, his abandonment to his roles.

More and more, it seems that Sutherland is becoming to this generation of filmgoers what Humphrey Bogart was to movie fans of the Forties and Fifties: an actor with fascinating and unusual looks, a performer who can play a dozen roles and make each one different. Even when Sutherland's films score low at the box office, they have a cult following: "Fellini's Casanova," "1900" and "Don't Look Now" are big numbers at the revival houses.

What it may come down to is that Sutherland is an original, and Hollywood--despite all legends to the contrary--is a very conventional place. There is something about Sutherland, about his looks, style, ideas, life, that cannot be put into a box: His politics are leftish and he speaks up form time to time; unlike most actors, he has not built a career with much forethought (instead, he has made a point of taking roles that please him--he will play a cameo or a feature role, if the director is interesting); he's a wild man with money and spends it with unusual abandon; unlike many stars, Sutherland will never end up owning the better part of downtown Arizona as a tax shelter.

As for the private Donald Sutherland, his life is both conventional and not. He's been married twice, had love affairs with some of the most interesting women on two continents; he has no interest in groupies or one-night stands. A critic of traditional marital forms, he's lived for ten years with Francine Racette, a beautiful French-Canadian actress with whom he's had two sons, Roeg, seven, and Rossif, three. Sutherland and Racette live together without living together very much. He spends most of his year on location and she, who says she likes her privacy, usually doesn't join him when he's making a movie. "It's great fun to have Donald around when he's here," she laughs. "Here" could be one of several places: their Brentwood, Los Angeles, home, their sailboat, a suite at New York's Sherry Netherland, a room in Montreal, Francine's apartment in Paris. Sutherland's life is the life of a vagabond--with five bases.

Yet it is as an actor that he remains his most unconventional. His films are a study in diversity: In "The Dirty Dozen," he's a child killer; in "M*A*S*H," he's a symbol of Sixties anger against war; in "Klute," he's the sweet/hard country detective who saves Jane Fonda from a homicidal maniac; in Bernardo Bertolucci's "1900," he is a homicidal maniac; in Federico Fellini's "Casanova," he's the great lover; in "Don't Look Now," he's an architect who presages his death in Venice; in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," he's a San Francisco food inspector who gets turned into an extraterrestrial pod.

Growing up in Nova Scotia, Sutherland spent a pained childhood feeling different from others: He was too tall, too sickly, too imaginative, too creative. His peers called him Dumbo and Goofus. Sutherland spent his childhood developing a fast-paced imagination that would later fuel his acting talent. How he moved from Nova Scotia to Hollywood, how he survived two marriages, several career setbacks, the madness of the Sixties and the dullness of the Seventies are all tales he tells to free-lance journalist Claudia Dreifus. Dreifus, whose interviews usually appear in the Sunday magazine of Newsday, filed this report:

"I first met Sutherland in 1971, when he was doing the 'Free the Army' shows with his good friend Jane Fonda. That was during the height of the Vietnam war and the 'F.T.A.' troupe was touring military bases to give GIs an antiwar revue. Sutherland was a big star already. He'd just done 'M*A*S*H' and 'Klute' and, to be nice about it, he was quite full of himself. My job was to cover the first 'F.T.A.' show in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for a rock magazine--and while I thought the show a great idea, Sutherland seemed very unpleasant and hostile. My impression of him then: closed, arrogant, self-righteous, a pain in the ass.

"Ten years later, the Donald Sutherland I met on assignment for Playboy turned out to be a very different man. The decade had worked massive changes on his character. His relationship with Francine Racette--free and yet committed--had obviously been good for him. His career, which had been on a roller coaster of ups and downs, was on the upswing again. 'Ordinary People' was turning his life into pure joy--not to mention big money because he had a percentage of the film's gross. On and off for six weeks this past summer, Sutherland and I met regularly in the dingy back office of his New York publicist. As it turned out, he had plenty of free time. A play for which he had signed a seven-month contract, Edward Albee's 'Lolita,' had closed after one week. Each day, we'd sit there with my tape recorder, with a huge pot of coffee, a mound of grapes for his special diet and my note pad of post-Freudian questions.

"Sutherland became extremely attached to the room and could work in no other place. A minor crisis once ensued when Candice Bergen wanted to use the room for something; she was sent elsewhere. At our third interview session, I suggested that Sutherland was qualifying too many of his statements--being too ambivalent at times. He looked at me sharply: 'I don't mean to be. I'll tell you anything you want. I want to make this a very truthful interview. I don't want to hold back.' And, after that, he didn't.

"When not making tapes, I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with Sutherland. He and Francine are great fun. One night, they took a group of us to a grand dinner; we were going to see Fellini's 'City of Women' after the meal, but that seemed superfluous. Three kinds of wines and champagnes flowed, along with good talk and great food. Francine, who has a French wit, explained why Sutherland had been so impossible to live with while he was making 'Fellini's Casanova' (she had left him behind in Italy for most of nine months): 'You cannot live with Casanova,' she laughed. 'Casanova is impossible. He is like silk. Silk is very nice to feel and to wear, but you cannot wash it.'

"After dinner, the group decided to walk to Rumpelmayer's on Central Park South--it's a place where Sutherland likes to go for postsupper milk shakes. During the ten-block stroll from the restaurant, Francine and her sister got lost. Sutherland was not concerned: 'Francine will turn up eventually.'

"An hour later, a flower girl came in from the street and informed Sutherland that a stranger had purchased a bouquet of roses for him. Not too long afterthat, a waitress arrived with a huge stuffed dinosaur--presumably, another gift from another admirer. This gift sparked his interest and he dashed outside to see what was going on. There was Francine, selling roses to passers-by: She had slipped the flower girl a few dollars and was plying her trade with a straight face. 'You conceited man!' Francine shouted at Sutherland with a mock pout. 'It sure took you a long time to get the message.' She had also rented a horse and carriage to take them home.

"The main thing I learned about Sutherland in the time I spent with him was that he's a man with a sleep need to be loved and appreciated--more than most people in show business. When ABC's '20/20' did a feature on him, several of his actor pals were asked to comment about him oncamera. All refused. Sutherland was wounded. No matter how much his publicist assured him that people like Robert De Niro, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall and Robert Redford just didn't do oncamera comments for anybody, he remained hurt.

"'You shouldn't take it personally,' I suggested. 'Hollywood people just don't have a Bronx street sense of loyalty.' He was not mollified.

"What Sutherland does when he needs a fix of affection and affirmation is to look for it on the street. He is the only movie star I've met who likes what happens to him when he strolls down Sixth Avenue. Strangers stop and stare. Autographs are requested. In response, he tips his Panama hat, offers a grin as wide as Central Park--and, for a brief moment, feels like he owns the town. As he signs autographs, he feels his ears are just fine and that he's far from Nova Scotia and Goofus; he feels that his life glows and that, yes, he is, indeed, very beautiful."

[Q] Playboy: In a recent magazine article, you were described as a "beautiful giraffe." Do you think you're good-looking, as movie stars are supposed to be?

[A] Sutherland: A beautiful giraffe? Giraffes are ugly. All I see is those long necks and the knobby little things on top of their heads. But, no, I don't like my face much. I'm not wild about my nose, I hate my ears. I wish my face were less thin. And I wish people wouldn't come up to me in airports and say, "My God, you sure look better in person than you do in movies."

[Q] Playboy: Your unconventional looks must have had something to do with your early career, when you played bizarre characters. Did you ever think you were in danger of becoming this generation's Boris Karloff?

[A] Sutherland: Boris Karloff? Mmm. I never thought of it that way--but, yes. I was working in British television in the early Sixties, and the kinds of roles I played were often homicidal maniacs--but artistic homicidal maniacs. Later, in my movie work, in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, I played a doctor who killed his vampire wife. At the end of the story, I'm in trouble and I remind the town's other doctor, "But you told me to drive a stake through her heart." He denies it, laughing, "What nonsense." After they cart me off to jail, he says, "There wasn't enough room in this town for two doctors--or two vampires." Then he flies away.

Let's see: In Die! Die! My Darling, I put lifts and shoulder pads on, dyed my hair white and played someone with a speech impediment who was retarded. In The Dirty Dozen, I played a guy who killed a child. And, of course, there was the one that started it all--Castle of the Living Dead, in 1964--and I played a witch in that. Come to think of it, it wasn't just in the early parts. Recently, in 1900, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, I played the part of a terrible, vicious killer. I mean, a guy who smashes cats to death by butting them with his head isn't someone most people will identify with.

[Q] Playboy: And yet one of the parts you'll he remembered for is that of Calvin Jarrett, the father in Ordinary People.

[A] Sutherland: Yes, I can't tell you how wonderful my street life has been since Ordinary People. Now strangers come up to me to say they have a cousin who is just like Calvin Jarrett. What I get from the public is warm and wonderful. But it started to turn around before that, in 1978, when I did Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It was a freaky movie, but my part was very mainstream. For once, I looked like the guy next door.

[Q] Playboy: Which must have been a relief.

[A] Sutherland: Yeah, especially when I consider the roles that were denied me because of my looks. Once, about 25 years ago, in London, I was up for a wonderful part in a movie called Three O'Clock in the Morning. I read for it and instantly knew I was absolutely right for the part. The next clay, I was taken to an office and was sat down as if I were a child about to be expelled from school and told, "We're terribly sorry. You're undoubtedly the best actor for the role, but this part calls for a guy-next-door type. Mr. Sutherland, you don't look like you've ever lived next door to anyone."

[Q] Playboy: Has it always been that way for you?

[A] Sutherland: Yeah, I was always a gawky kid. I had polio and my left leg was shorter than my right, and when I was ten or eleven, I was a head taller than anyone around. My head was thin and long and everyone called me Goofus or Dumbo. The implication there was that I had ears so big I could fly with them.

Once, during summer vacation, the other kids hid up in a tree and when I walked beneath them, they peed on my head. I went to my mother, who never allowed herself to be surprised about anything, and told her about it. She looked at me gently and said, "Well, Donnie, what did you expect?" She was wonderfully honest and would never lie about anything. I asked her once, "Am I good-looking?" She said, "No." But then she added, "Your face has a lot of character, Donnie."

[Q] Playboy: Which wasn't what you wanted to hear.

[A] Sutherland: No. Though I had a wonderful childhood inside my head, outside I was terrified about how I related to the rest of the world. I hoped, somehow, that I had some kind of mask that would let me slide through. I hoped people wouldn't go, "Ugh!" when they saw me.I really wanted, desperately, to be ordinary--anonymous.

[Q] Playboy: It doesn't sound like you had a chance. Do you want to talk about it?

[A] Sutherland: OK. The basic facts about my childhood are that I was born in St. John, New Brunswick, in 1935. My family lived on a farm in Hampton, a half hour out of town. We had a cow named Bossie, and pigs. As a child, I was sick all the time. I had polio, rheumatic fever, hepatitis, a mastoidectomy, two tonsillectomies--the first one was incomplete--and, basically, every illness in the book. I seemed to be accident-prone. Once, my mother said, "Donnie, watch out for that stick," and the next thing I knew, this big wooden stick was stuck in my throat. My mother had to hold on to my blood vessel to keep me alive until the doctor arrived. Getting sick wasn't all that bad. My father, who hates hospitals, would break his ass to get private nurses for me. I was my father's favorite. As for the family, it was loving--close. My mother was a minister's daughter, with a very strong sense of right and wrong.

[Q] Playboy: What was your father?

[A] Sutherland: My father is a gambler--an 87-year-old gambler. When my father wasn't gambling, he was a salesman--a wonderful salesman, a brilliant entrepreneur. He used to pride himself on having the largest sales record and the largest expense account of any salesman in all Canada. He used to say that he would have been the best salesman in the world if he had been born an American--which is such a Canadian thing to say.

Canadians are so incredibly insecure. Every single Canadian has, somewhere in his psyche, a feeling that people in the United States have some kind of visceral cultural and life experiences that lie does not have. If you're Canadian, you think about a person from the States as the brother who went out to sea and caught the clap and made $1,000,000 in Costa Rica or Hong Kong.

[Q] Playboy: Back to your father. Was it fun--his flamboyance, his gambling?

[A] Sutherland: No. The gambling never was. Sometimes, we'd go to these wonderfully elegant hotels and I remember my lather sitting at one and saying, "I wonder what the poor people are doing today." And he'd order something very extravagant from the waiter and turn to my mother and say, "What do we care for expenses? We've got plenty of money!" In fact, he had lost everything. We had nothing. My mother was in tears for the whole meal.

You know, recently, I got a letter from my first wife, Lois. She'd seen Ordinary People and she thought I'd played my father in it. But that wasn't right--my father is nothing like Calvin Jarrett. He is, in fact, the reverse of him. The closest I've been to my father in a movie was the old man in Fellini's Casanova. There were parallels to draw on: My father's a strong individual, but he's never thought all that much about the future. Never. It's a real drag. But, anyway, in Casanova, I was trying to sound and move like him. And when they put the old-age make-up on me, I looked in the mirror and I saw the face of my mother! Francine came into the dressing room and went, "Ahhhh!" It was a shock.

[Q] Playboy: Was being an adolescent in Nova Scotia hard?

[A] Sutherland: Adolescence everywhere is hard. Its normal condition is madness.

[Q] Playboy: What about yours in particular? Were you a rebellious teenager?

[A] Sutherland: No, not at all. There was a lot of Calvinist feeling in my house. As I said, my mother's father was a minister, and some things--sex, for instance--were never talked about. People now have no idea how repressed the Forties were--how dry, how sexually ignorant. My body's changes were terribly frightening to me. My first erection happened in a school shower. I had no idea what it was. Well, in school, we had been shown a film about venereal disease and hookers in Japan. No one told us anything useful about vaginas or penises or sexuality or anything we needed to know. All they said was, "Something will happen and you'll get a disease and you'll have huge sores." So when I got my first erection, I was convinced it was a venereal disease. I walked around for two whole days, wondering how I was going to explain to my mother that I had V.D.

[Q] Playboy: Did you have a difficult time With girls?

[A] Sutherland: At first, I was mostly afraid and guilty--oh, so guilty! But I always had girlfriends--some really wonderful and beautiful women. But it always surprised me that they wanted anything to do with me. The guilt--that was the big thing. My first kind of sexual experience--all it was was kissing and touching. I must have been 13. We sat on her back porch. She was wearing panties and it was so erotic. But as soon as we had finished, I jumped tip and said, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" And I was kneeling and begging her to forgive me. God, that's so awful. Just the thought of it.

In the next couple of months, someone told me about masturbation. I had no idea what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I went home and masturbated. And, God, I have to tell you, it was the hugest shock! I never expected anything to come out from where I peed! When I suddenly had this overwhelming explosion, I nearly died of a heart attack. Needless to say, I felt this was original sin--this had to be, if anything was.

[Q] Playboy: You didn't trust your senses? You couldn't say to yourself, "Hey, this feels good, I should go with it"?

[A] Sutherland: Oh, God, no. You know the Lena Horne song, "If it feels good, it must be right"? Well, the main feeling I had was, If it feels good, it must be wrong. Even when, years later, it came to making love to a girl I was in love with, even that felt wrong. Some of this has caused sadness. I think if I were to live my life over again, the only thing I would do differently is make love more. All the times that guilt or Protestantism or whatever has held me back from making love to someone I had affection for, well, that's been my loss.

[Q] Playboy: Did you always want to leave Nova Scotia for Hollywood and the big time?

[A] Sutherland: Oh, no. When I was a boy, I never wanted to be a movie actor. It wasn't within the realm of possibility. The idea of being a stage actor was fine. Hollywood was someplace you knew existed, like never-never land, but real people didn't live there. And if they did, no one from Nova Scotia ever got there, anyway. As I said earlier, to be born Canadian is to be born with somewhat of an inferiority complex. No, what happened to me was that I decided to study acting at the University of Toronto. I did school plays. I did summer stock. I did terrible work in engineering classes, which is what my father wanted. Then, toward the end of time at school, I made a bet with myself. I had this small part in The Tempest, a hard part. I prepared very carefully. There was a very influencial critic at the Toronto Globe and Mail, Herbert Whittaker, and I said to myself, If he likes what I've done, I'll become an actor. If he doesn't, I'll quit.

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Sutherland: And he wrote, "Donald Sutherland has a spark of talent that illuminates the stage." So the year after my graduation, when I was 23, I went to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Very snobby. Very prestigious. Very, very British. It was there that I was completely miserable. And it was there, because of bad training, that I lost my voice. Oh, I had the most beautiful, deep, melodic voice! I could do almost anything with it. My teacher, Iris Warren, said it was the wrong octave for the English stage. She made me do exercises to raise it an octave and I strained my vocal cords and then . . . my voice was gone. I couldn't afford to go to high-priced Harley Street doctors to get it fixed afterward, either.

Iris Warren hated my guts. She once went up to an actor friend of mine at a school Christmas party and said. "George, you mustn't spend so much time with Donald, we have respect for your work." It was hard for me to be so--disliked. I have a strong need to be liked by the people I'm around. But ever since then, I haven't had much respect for acting teachers. That place was just not good for North American actors--they treated them horribly. North Americans have a different temperament, voice, attitude.

[Q] Playboy: Were you treated like a provincial?

[A] Sutherland: I was a provincial. I was from Nova Scotia. I was like Klute--the first time he sees New York. By the end of my second year--it was a three-year program--I knew things were only going to get worse if I stayed, so I dropped out. When I look back on it now, I think I had a kind of minor breakdown around that time. I just remember my scalp and my ears moving in a way that was so tense. I was very, very nervous and unhappy.

[Q] Playboy: You were married around that time, weren't you?

[A] Sutherland: Yes. I had met Lois at the University of Toronto and we had lived together. When I was at my unhappiest in London, she happened to send me some roses. The next day, she phoned me from Canada. "Did you get the roses?" And I said, "Oh, for God's sake, get on a boat and come here." So she got on a boat and we got married and it lasted for seven years.

[Q] Playboy: Why didn't it last longer?

[A] Sutherland: Because it was a fix for my loneliness at that moment. But it wasn't a life remedy. Lois and I . . . even now, we're good friends. She just wrote to me the other day and asked me to send her some tapes of poetry I used to read to her. We did a lot of that: reading to each other.

[Q] Playboy: After you left the academy, your career improved, didn't it?

[A] Sutherland: Oh, yes. There was a wonderful year working in a repertory company in Perth, Scotland, and it was there that I developed a great liking for Scotch whisky. By 1961, I was working in repertory theaters all around England and doing parts on British television, on The Saint and things like that.

In 1964, I did my first big feature, Castle of the Living Dead, which was shot in Italy, and it was there that my film career began to take off. It was also there, in 1964, that I fell into the house of Shirley Douglas, my second wife.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to Lois?

[A] Sutherland: I had fallen in love with a woman, a secret woman. We were together about a year, furtively. When that relationship ended, so did the marriage. Everything just fell apart. For a while after that, I lived with another woman, a really beautiful, intelligent actress. And then came Italy and Shirley. But the marriage to Lois just basically ended the way it began: It had run its course. It just stopped. It was like a bus ride. I got on the bus and then I got off.

Now, my second marriage, to Shirley, wasn't like that at all. With her, it was more like flagging a bus--and getting run over. Shirley . . . Shirley, she's a very complex and interesting woman. Her father was the head of the New Democratic Party--which is the left political party in Canada. I was attracted to Shirley in the same way I'm still attracted to her. She's a very dynamic, powerful, extraordinary person. From the first, we didn't make a very good couple. Our needs were so different. But in 1966, when it turned out that she was pregnant, it wasn't so much like a burden--it was a gift. It was like, "Ah, thank God, maybe this will make the thing work for us." I mean, we loved each other. So we got married in the middle of the filming of The Dirty Dozen. John Cassavetes was my best-man. Shirley and I had three or four very difficult years ahead. We stayed together under the most difficult circumstances until . . . until I met another woman.

[Q] Playboy: Jane Fonda?

[A] Sutherland: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: We'll talk about that later. Why did you and Shirley have such a stormy time?

[A] Sutherland: Things didn't work because her life and my life didn't fit together. We had twins, and they were wonderful. But we were pulling apart all the time. Shirley was "the boss" in the marriage. My role in the relationship was to be inferior on as many levels as possible. When my career really took off with The Dirty Dozen and with M*A*S*H, I think my success became very, very difficult for her to take. I wasn't inferior anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Did you do a lot of drinking during that marriage?

[A] Sutherland: Drinking is an understatement for what we did: a bottle of Scotch a day. Shirley was a heavy drinker at the time--she's since stopped.

[Q] Playboy: Did you drink a lot together?

[A] Sutherland: I think we drank a lot--apart. We'd start the day by getting up and filling an orange-juice glass with Scotch. And things went on from there. Oh, God, I remember . . . once in 1967, we had just moved to Los Angeles from Europe. The Dirty Dozen had come out and it seemed a good idea to be near the work in L.A. Well, Shirley thought it was very important for us to live in Beverly Hills, because "the schools are better for the kids." We didn't have two cents to live on. But, somehow, Shirley borrowed $50,000 from a bank in England and we moved into one of the most expensive rental houses in all Beverly Hills. Well, we lived there--without money for clothes or food or even the whisky and four packs of cigarettes a day we were doing. One day, after making a total ass of myself at a Hollywood producer's home, I stopped drinking.

[Q] Playboy: You just stopped flat?

[A] Sutherland: Yes. That and smoking. All at once. It was Monday and I said, "On Saturday night, at midnight, I will go to bed and never smoke cigarettes or drink whisky again." And I never have. I do drink wine. But whisky . . . I hate being out of control.

[Q] Playboy: Was it hard to go cold turkey?

[A] Sutherland: No. I can do anything I want to. I was obsessed and crazed by it for a whole day--but then I was Ok. You know, once in 1967, Shirley had me go to this doctor in England--a psychiatrist. I was depressed, I guess. Well, he put me on Stelazine in combination with something else. The combination was so harmful it was banned in the United States. Well, I took those horrible drugs for two years. When I got back to the States, my own doctor couldn't believe I was taking that drug. He told me it would take months to get off. I said, "No, I'm off of it as of this minute." And I was. I don't know what the longterm results might be, but I could get off of heroin it I had to. I might be a banana afterward, but I could still get off.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you permit anyone to give you Stelazine? That's a drug usually given to psychotics.

[A] Sutherland: I went to the psychiatrist because Shirley told me to. That is what he gave me. I did everything Shirley told me to do.

[Q] Playboy: You just surrendered your will?

[A]Sutherland: I don't mints surrendering will. I mean, I know, sexually that's what I do--that's part of what I do.

[Q] Playboy: From what we've read, Shirley was very involved in radical politics and, while you were sympathetic, you were less of an activist. Did that make for conflicts?

[A] Sutherland: Oh, yes. I was an actor, am an actor. I might imbue my work with political sensibilities, but I am an actor first. As for Shirley, she spent some of her time on street corners trying to convert any black person she met to the Black Panther Party--something I was not doing. I kind of resigned myself to the situation anti tried to figure out the best way to support her and the children. In the end, I thought it was much more important to be an actor. God, you can't believe the strange things that went on in my life during that time! Do you know that Shirley and the Friends of the Black Panthers used to have meetings in my house that were so secret that I wasn't allowed to attend? I found that so appalling. . . . We were making M*A*S*H at the time--and the whole thing was maddening. If you look at M*A*S*H again, you'll see me get into a fluster about something during one scene. Elliott Gould puts a spoon in my mouth and calls me Shirley. That's because he was making fun of me and the kind of turmoil going on in my house.

[Q] Playboy: Turmoil? The FBI raided your house; that's more than turmoil--that's big trouble.

[A] Sutherland: That actually happened a couple of times. Once, the police raided our country house in New York. They were looking for Angela Davis, but she wasn't there. Angela, I think, was at the Holiday Inn or somewhere. But the really awful raid was while I was in Yugoslavia making Kelly's Heroes. Our house in Los Angeles was raided and Shirley was charged with conspiracy to raise money for firearms for the Black Panthers, or something wild like that. They scared the living bejesus out of my kids and harassed them. During the raid, they said, "All right, Shirley, up against the wall," and they held a gun against my stepson's head. The police went in with guns drawn at two in the morning, and they took Shirley to the station. I don't know what happened--whether it was true that she put a check in the mailbox for $100, as they said, or whether she had ordered hand grenades or whatever it was. The case was eventually thrown out of court.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do in Yugoslavia when von heard about the FBI raid?

[A] Sutherland: It was not the best news to hear. But filming Kelly's Heroes was a hummer on a lot of scores. I nearly died there in Yugoslavia. Spinal meningitis. I was in a coma; I remember being inside my body and looking out. Anti I could see through my eyelids. Doctors at the bottom of the bed were talking, and I couldn't understand a damn word, because they spoke Serbo-Croatian. I guess they were saying I was dying. They called Shirley and told her that I would be dead before she arrived. She flew to Yugoslavia--and apparently made funeral arrangements for me in England. When she got there, I was alive. It was an awkward moment for the relationship. For the first time in about six months, she embraced me. I couldn't tell her that in lifting me up off the bed and embracing me the way she did, she was causing me more pain than I had ever experienced in my life. Our relationship had really turned terrible by that time. I mean, she could hardly kiss me.

[Q] Playboy: In Ordinary People, Mary Tyler Moore's character has great difficulty touching her son--

[A] Sutherland: Yes, but I didn't make the connection until I saw the picture. When I was playing the part, I didn't think about any parallels to my own life. Afterward, when I saw the movie, I started to laugh; it was like home used to be. It wasn't that Shirley had trouble touching me--she couldn't stand touching me. A lot of the wounds I felt because of that relationship finally healed when I went with Jane. Jane is a truly wonderful person to love--a loving, loving person.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned M*A*S*H. Was it fun to work with Robert Altman?

[A] Sutherland: I wouldn't say it was fun. I loved Elliott [Gould] and a lifetime friendship was made there. But I was having a hard time with Shirley and, M*A*S*H was a very "group" kind of thing. I'm not good in groups. People were doing a lot of dope. I was "Elliott's friend." I wasn't Altman's first choice for the part, anyway. He wanted James Garner. Ingo Preminger, the producer, had seen me in The Dirty Dozen and it was he who wanted me. The whole experience was very strange, very confused. Altman had thrown the script away and he'd fired the cameraman. Bob was directing it in such a way that we didn't do the same sound take for a close-up or a medium shot. We said different things. 1 don't know how the sound editor got it all together. I hope he got an Oscar. He sure deserved a citation from God, because he did a genius job on it.

[Q] Playboy: Did the stardom that came with M*A*S*H feel good?

[A] Sutherland: It felt good for Elliott. For me, it was a mixed thing. But I do remember going to New York after M*A*S*H, and Elliott was at the height of his success and people just mobbed him wherever he went. We went into this wonderful restaurant and he ordered a bottle of Château Laffite, 1949, and everyone in the restaurant was looking at us. Four waiters in white tails brought us the wine. The wine was sniffed and poured and approved of and Elliott swirled it around in his mouth. Then he looked up at the waiter, grinned idiotically and let the wine drip out of his mouth onto his suit. The reaction in the restaurant was one of the funniest sights you've ever seen in your life, though nobody laughed.

[Q] Playboy: And it was through Gould that you met Jane Fonda, wasn't it?

[A] Sutherland: Yes. She had come to Elliott's house for something. She was still with Roger Vadim at the time. I remember we touched hands--just the tips of our fingers--and it was really electric. A couple of clays later, she came to my kitchen and we talked. Jane was going through huge changes at the time. She was just about to leave Vadim. She and a companion had traveled across the United States and she had seen her own country from a completely new perspective. In a firsthand way, Jane was learning about Indians, ghettos, poverty--things she had known about only abstractly before. And she was so very open to everything she was seeing. She soon announced herself as a radical and became an activist. Well, at the same time that Jane was going through this, we fell in love. I left Shirley--though Jane and I never really lived together continuously. Basically, our three years together were a time when we were both experimenting and seeking: politically, emotionally, personally. I lived mostly in rented rooms. At the Chateau Marmont in L.A., in a loft in Chelsea in New York while we were making Klute.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like to mix up your personal, political and professional lives?

[A] Sutherland: It was one big bowl of soup and it was terrific, wonderful. You couldn't ask for a more generous, exciting, funny, sensuous woman than Jane. I loved her with all my heart. As we talk now, I have a vision of her--of how funky she looked with a curly wig in Steelyard Blues. Jane would talk a great deal about "fragmentation"--about how painful it was not to live a life with "a center." We fought, we struggled not to live fragmented lives.

[Q] Playboy: Whose idea were the Free the Army [F.T.A.] shows that you, Jane and others did in the early Seventies?

[A] Sutherland: Jane's--and also Howard Levy's, who was an ex--Army captain court-martialed for refusing to train Green Berets. What we did was tour military bases--here and in the Far East--and put on antiwar revues. My part was to read the final passage from Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun--the section where the guy wakes up and discovers he has no arms or legs. The idea behind F.T.A. was to show GIs--and this was during the heat of the Vietnam war--that not all performers were Bob Hope. We gave them mild antiwar satires and they loved it.

GIs hated that war, hated what they were being forced to do. Wherever we'd go, soldiers would come up to us and tell us of atrocities they'd committed, of the bad dreams they were having because of it, about how much they wanted the war to end. For me, I had no trouble participating in that kind of protest. I didn't like doing anything political within the United States--because I am, after all, Canadian. But there was a huge Canadian participation in the war--and so I felt, on this, I had a right.

The F.T.A. shows were incredibly important to me on a personal level. I had experienced these incredible successes with Klute and M*A*S*H and it would have been real easy to become overwhelmed by big-star fantasies. The tours always brought me down to earth. You can't feel like you're such hot stuff when you're in the Philippines and some soldier is telling you about how his best friend was blown up for nothing.

[Q] Playboy: Did your participation in F.T.A. hurt your career?

[A] Sutherland: I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't think the authorities tried to smear me in the same way they tried to smear Jane. What I do know is that I carne back from the F.T.A. tour and things just fell apart. I had been considered one of the major "bankable" stars, along with Streisand and Redford and folks like that, just before I left. And then, you know, I just went off to the Far East with Jane for a year. When I came back, I was broke and there were a lot of people in the film-making community who weren't particularly happy with my political position. While my films remained strong in Europe, nothing really big happened for me until 1973 and Don't Look Now.

[Q] Playboy: During the years you were with Jane, her every movement was monitored by the Government. What was it like to have a relationship under surveillance?

[A] Sutherland: Funny. Every call was bugged, so you talked in code and gobbledygook. We'd have a supersecret rendezvous. We had a house--or she had a house--with a garage on one street, a front door on another and a back door on a third street. I'd leave the house at night, drive around the block and drive back to the garage, which had a door that led directly to the bedroom, and then we'd go to sleep. For a good year, nobody knew we were together, despite all the surveillance. We had a wonderful time. We'd laugh about it. But once--and this wasn't funny--Jane was coming into the States through Canada, and the police kept her in jail and wouldn't let her change her tampon and other things. They laid it down heavy on her.

[Q] Playboy: And not on you? It certainly must have bothered you to see men in dirty raincoats standing in front of your house taking notes every time you and Jane held hands.

[A] Sutherland: No. There had been more of those guys in front of Shirley's house.

[Q] Playboy: Why did the affair end?

[A] Sutherland: To be honest, there never was the sense that it would go on for all that long. I mean, it was not going to be a permanent relationship and we both knew it. While it was going on, it was terribly exciting at all levels. Looking back on it now, those three years provided me the basis of what I guess will be the rest of my life. Jane helped me come out of an intellectual and emotional closet. In the end, I guess, we just fell out of love with each other. We had broken up once before we started the F.T.A. tour, and then we got together again. We stayed together as friends throughout most of the F.T.A. tour. Jane had a lot of other work. She was going in a whole other way.

[Q] Playboy: Was the breakup related to Tom Hayden?

[A] Sutherland: No. Not really. No, it wasn't. It was just over.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do after that?

[A] Sutherland: Shot myself! [Laughs] No, what I did was buy a dog. I did. I bought a beautiful Scottish otterhound and I packed my bags and went inside my head. I've come out a lot now and again since then. In the period after that, I spent a lot of time traveling. I was in Japan and then came back through Europe to America. Got my dog and went to Miami. Went to Canada and made Alien Thunder there. While on that movie, I met Francine and fell very carefully in love with her. I've been in love with her ever since.

[Q] Playboy: When you say carefully, what do you mean?

[A] Sutherland: Just that. Carefully. Falling in love with Francine was like diving into a lake--and I was checking to see if there were any rocks there. Usually, I fell in love and I crashed on my head.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet her?

[A] Sutherland: We were working on this movie together and I took an instant dislike to her. She was tall and dark and very beautiful. She didn't seem to like me very much. For me, the need to be liked is very big. We were both living at the Idylwyld Motel in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. She lived upstairs from me. She had a dog, and I had that wonderful Scottish hound. Most of our communication involved our trying to keep our clogs apart. One afternoon, I was having a shower and I had left my door open so that my clog could come and go. Well, the clog ran off and I ran after it--wet, from the shower, starknaked. And suddenly, there was Francine standing in the doorway. She took one look at me and she ran away. She was back a minute later, though. She had not run away because she was shocked--she had run to get her glasses! It was funny.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to the dogs?

[A] Sutherland: The dogs made love and so did we. The dogs had babies and so did we.

[Q] Playboy: Today, you choose not to marry, despite the fact that you have two children together.

[A] Sutherland:She chose not to marry. When Francine was about 11 years old, her mother took her to the wedding of a cousin that scared the living bejesus out of her. She was literally so frightened that she ran home and said, "Please--I'll do anything you ask, just don't make me get married ever." And I had a similar experience. But instead of going "to watch," I had "to be." For someone who lives day to clay, the way I do, those two marriages weighed on me like a stone. I can commit to the future as long as I'm not compelled to. Francine gives me ample breathing room--more breathing room than the German government would have wanted in 1939. You know, we spent our first two years together not being able to talk much with each other. She spoke no English--I no French. All we ever did was communicate physically and eat and drink.

[Q] Playboy: And how do you manage the problems of monogamy and commitment?

[A] Sutherland: Monogamy and commitment? How do I handle them? Privately--very privately. Very, very privately.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you and Francine decide to have children?

[A] Sutherland: Well, from the very beginning, Francine wanted children. When she entered into the relationship, she said, "Listen, one thing you get to give me out of this is a child." I said, "OK." I mean, we were in love. It was hard to go about doing it. She had to have all kinds of things done. You know, her body was not ready--there was some kind of blockage of the Fallopian tubes. But as soon as that got corrected, she got pregnant in about three hours. Roeg, he was a pure child of love.

I was present at both of our sons' births and participated in them. It's very exciting and exhilarating to give birth to a baby. Our second son, Rossif, was born with his umbilical cord wrapped three times around his head. When I saw this, I nearly died. When he came out, his face was purple. And that affects you. Whenever lie cuts himself or bruises himself, I get shocked.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been a parent to the twins you had with Shirley?

[A] Sutherland: They're with Shirley, of course. I was a good parent to them when I was allowed to be alone with them. But it was never like it is now with me and Francine. I mean, we share everything, me and Francine. We shift and change roles. I do everything from warm the bottles to feed to change the diapers. She does more than I. Èut we do interchange. I wouldn't want to imply that we have a role reversal. I'm not doing what John Lennon did. That wouldn't be within my nature. But the twins, well, Shirley and my relationship was such that we couldn't participate mutually. You know, I just got a lousy letter from one of the twins. She's 14, and 14-year-olds are just crazy. You can't really hold anything they say at 14 against them. The best thing to do is forget it, forget what you might have done if you'd gained custody.

[Q] Playboy: Do the twins resent you?

[A] Sutherland: I would think so. Particularly that daughter.

[Q] Playboy: Through all this turmoil, you seem like a man who likes--and needs--women.

[A] Sutherland: Oh, gosh. I certainly do. The women I've been involved with through my life have really been terrific. Basically, I have better relationships with women than with men.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Sutherland: I get on better with women because, basically, I like making love with them better than making love with men. And I find everything about their psyche and their struggle wonderful, exhilarating. There are some men I'm close to--Elliott Gould, Robert Redford, Sean Connery. But, on the whole, I feel more relaxed with women, more at ease.

[Q] Playboy: You say you like making love with women better than with men. Does that mean you've been attracted to men?

[Q] Sutherland: You mean sexually?

[A] Playboy: Yes.

[A] Sutherland: No. But I do have a friend, a make-up guy I really like to go dancing with. I do have a wonderful time dancing and being with him. But it's not sexual.

[Q]Playboy: Freud says that the two things that motivate a human being are love and work; but we've talked mostly about love, about sex. Let's change the subject to your work.

[A] Sutherland: Sometimes the feeling is the same, you know. When I'm acting, I'm kind of a concubine to the director. I mean that, quite seriously. My job is to understand the character and give the director what he wants. What I have to do is satisfy him. It is very intimate, very sensuous, very loving to do that. The director ends up liking you because you satisfy him and you end up loving him because it is very satisfying making someone else happy. It's like being a good lover to someone--wonderful. With Nick Roeg, with Federico Fellini, with John Schlesinger, with Bob Redford, I think I've been a very good lover.

[Q] Playboy: Did you always have that attitude about acting?

[A] Sutherland: Oh, no. I used to think the actor was all-important. The truth is that film making is about directors. When I made Klute with Alan Pakula, there were real problems. I had a specific way I wanted the character to be--a different way from Alan's. I wanted Klute to go to New York with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent and I wanted him to be more shocked by the decadence of the place--the shopping-bag ladies, the poverty, the extreme wealth. Well, all of that made for big problems between Alan and me. It was, after all, his movie and my ideas were outside the context of the film. Alan is an interesting man. He has a wonderful area on his back--from the shoulder blades just up to his cortex. It's very straight and very interesting to look at. Basically, he didn't like me very much.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Sutherland: I don't know. Anyway, he behaved as if he didn't like me very much. Looking back on it, he was absolutely within his rights, because I was behaving in a self-centered way. I was very self-righteous in those days. Now, when I think about the way I was, I just want to cringe.

Do you know that Jane and I went through a whole period when we wouldn't sign autographs for people? We thought we didn't want to be classified as "movie stars," that being movie stars was elitist and that by signing autographs, we were encouraging people to feel inferior. I'd get a letter from a fan who'd liked Klute and who wanted an autograph for his daughter. Then I'd write this guy a long political letter--very personal, no form letter--saying why I was no better or worse than he and that autographs were elitist. I'd sign the letter. Then, a few weeks later, I'd get a letter back from the same man: "Dear Mr. Sutherland--my wife and I would like to thank you for your letter. We thought it was really bullshit, but we cut your signature off for my daughter."

Nowadays, I sign autographs with great pleasure and happiness.

[Q] Playboy: When did your attitude about acting change?

[A] Sutherland: I began to understand that the actor is not important with Nick Roeg and Don't Look Now. That must have been 1972. Roeg had sent me the script for the movie and then telephoned me. On the phone, I said, "Well, the character should do this and that." Roeg said, "No, we're not making any changes. The script is going to be what I want it to be. Take it or leave it." So I thought to myself, Why not try this? Let's find out what it's like to not interfere. That conversation changed my life--changed my whole attitude about acting. Now I think of myself as the director's plaything. Film acting, basically, is about the surrender of will to the director. Francine and I named our first son after Nick Roeg--that's how important the lesson was. Our second son, Rossif, is named after Frédéric Rossif, the director of To Die in Madrid. Francine lived with him for many years and he is a great friend.

[Q] Playboy:Don't Look Now is a memorable movie. What was it like to shoot it?

[A] Sutherland: I love that movie. Among all my 40 or so pictures, it ranks high as a personal favorite. But making it was perilous. We filmed in Venice; and when I had nearly died from spinal meningitis in Yugoslavia, they flew me to Venice. So, when I returned to do Don't Look Now, I had this premonition that I was definitely going to die in Venice.

[Q] Playboy: Which is what the movie is about--a man who has visions of his own death.

[A] Sutherland: And that's what I was having every minute I was there. A lot of my own life was paralleling the movie. I mean, I was death-obsessed. As a kid, I could tell you everything there was about dying. About how long it took Ethel Rosenberg to die in the electric chair, about how a man looks after lie is hanged, about what happens in death by drowning. Me, I've always been convinced that I was going to die by drowning--and there I was in Venice, with water everywhere.

[Q] Playboy: This is beginning to sound like Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.

[A] Sutherland: It was! For one thing, I had vertigo, and the movie required that I do things like go to the top of a scaffolding in a church, way up, be hit by a board and dangle there in the air, hanging from a rope.

[Q] Playboy: Don't film companies hire stunt men for tasks like that?

[A] Sutherland: They couldn't get a stunt man to do it. The Italian stunt man who'd been hired wasn't given the proper insurance. He went up on the ladder and halfway up, he came down and said, "I'm not doing it!" So I'm standing there, and I've got vertigo, but I have no choice. The production didn't have the money to hire another church for another day. So I go up there to have some guy throw a wooden board on me. I'm saying, "Fuck it--this film has to happen." I tie myself up on a rig, climb up 50 feet, and I know if I turn a bit too much in the wrong direction, the wire that's holding me will break and I'll be dead. Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I have no vertigo. I'm 50 feet above the floor. I had never done that before. I made Nick promise me that when I had swung, I would just go over and land on a platform he'd rigged. He had a camera there. Well, I did that, but he got so excited that lie pushed me off the platform--and there I was, dangling in the air again. The next day, Julie Christie and I had to shoot the love scene.

[Q] Playboy:That love scene? The steamiest, sexiest love scene in modern cinema? Was it embarrassing for the old Calvinist in you?

[A] Sutherland: Well, what do you think? You're in a room for eight hours. In bed. Naked. Two guys with noisy cameras are there and they're photographing your bun, your cock, your mouth, your nose, your everything. Yes, it makes for a little self-consciousness. Julie and I had an agreement that any footage that exposed either of our sexual organs would be given to us, so that we could burn the negatives.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Sutherland: Because I don't think that's what being an actor is about. If I wanted to do that, I'd just go make blue movies. I draw the line on a certain kind of explicitness--I'd rather people used their imaginations a little. The sex scene was important to the film because it was a way those two people could express their love and their need for each other. But I do draw the line. I remember watching Bobby De Niro and Gerard Depardieu in 1900, in the scene where they both take this woman to bed. They were nude. Well, it seemed to me that there was a terrible vulnerability and self-consciousness that was inherent in the situation. It seemed a little . . . beyond the pale. And there are so many social taboos in male nudity, and the male sexual organ specifically, that I don't see any value an audience can get from looking at my cock--hard, soft or indifferent.

The reason the sex scene in Don't Look Now works is that Roeg cuts away all the time and breaks it up. You have something else to look at--besides the actual sex. I felt very pure about that scene. And very self-conscious. And very self-protective. Julie and I felt very honorable in doing it. I was dismayed later on, when I heard what happened to that scene in the higher echelons of the old regime at Paramount--and I was dismayed at how much despair it caused in certain quarters. Julie, I think, was punished for that scene by people who felt it was improper for her to do. I heard rumors that some people took the love scene out of context and showed it around in private screening rooms. If that's true, I really resent it. Because that was a beautiful movie, a beautiful scene--and it was hard to do.

[Q] Playboy: Were you and Julie offscreen lovers at the time?

[A] Sutherland: No. I was with Francine already. I don't know how that rumor got around. I have a huge amount of respect and affection for her, but no.

[Q] Playboy: After Don't Look Now, you played the Fascist Attila, in Bertolucci's 1900. It was an ambitious movie but a commercial failure in the U. S. What was the problem?

[A] Sutherland: There were many problems with the way the film turned out. Bertolucci, basically, was doing an opera about Italy. As for Attila--my character Attila--he was two-dimensional bordering on one-dimensional. That wasn't really my fault. Bernardo and I had different concepts of the character--and I was into doing it his way. This was after Nick Roeg. Anyway, I came to the part wanting to do something out of Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism. I wanted to create a Fascist who started out with fanaticism and a true belief that he was right. He becomes a bureaucrat, not so much out of conviction as out of habit. I wanted to create a bureaucrat who made people think, There but for the grace of God go I. Well, Bernardo had a completely different idea. He wanted an operatic monster. Me, I should have known as much as soon as I saw the script.

But I've got to say, we did have some nice parties during the making of that movie. One night, we rented a hotel and we had a wonderful dinner for the whole crew, with a bottle of wine for everybody. And a band. And a magician. And two strippers. At the head of the table, there were turkeys and lambs and pig and geese all cooked. Oh, God, it was wonderful Actually, the party wouldn't have gotten too expensive if we hadn't ordered a cream cake for each person. By the time we got to the cake, everyone was so drunk and happy that someone pushed his cake into the next person's face. Then, basically, what you had was an Italian custard-pie fight. I had to pay for a new ceiling for the hotel and a new rug. I had to buy a new saxophone for the band. One of the strippers was the only person to criticize it. She said she had never seen anything so juvenile and stomped off in a rage. But, gosh, it was a wonderful party.

[Q] Playboy: Was it because of 1900 that you came to be Fellini's Casanova?

[A] Sutherland: Well, partly. Actually, we had met during the filming of Alex in Wonderland. Fellini had a role in that movie. But when I was in Parma, making 1900, he came up with a friend and we had a wonderful little lunch together. That must have been in 1975. I wasn't working that particular day, and so I drove him to Milan and as we drove, he told me about his plans for the film. He said, "Forget everything you've thought or heard about Casanova. The film I want to make has nothing to do with anything else. It is about Italy and not remembering the past and about political dilemmas." Mostly, he was talking about Casanova's inability as a person to remember the past and learn by it. Thus, he was constantly repeating himself. As soon as he fell in love, the past didn't exist.

[Q] Playboy: After a childhood in which you were thought of as ugly, it must have been a delight to be offered the chance to play one of the great lovers of history.

[A] Sutherland: It was wonderful, truly wonderful. They'd put me in my clothes and I'd sit there happily for ten hours, waiting for Fellini to call me. If he didn't want me, that was fine. I was happy as a pig in shit. They shaved my head, shaved my eyebrows and they gave me a new nose and a new chin, and I truly thought I was beautiful. Now people come up to me and say how brave I was to make myself so ugly. I'm amazed. I thought I looked wonderful.

[Q] Playboy: Why did the movie take a year to make?

[A] Sutherland: It was supposed to take only eight months, but there was a hiatus of two or three months in the middle of it. The negative of the film was stolen. Someone broke into the vaults where it was stored and stole raw film, negatives. They took some of Sergio Leone's film, some of Bertolucci's and some of Fellini's. They knew what to take. You see, you don't edit negatives, you edit prints. And, basically, what happened was that someone was holding the entire Italian film industry to ransom. Whether, in fact, anybody did pay for it, I don't know. All I know is I went to Aspen and skied with Francine and eventually we started again. But, as long as it took, some of the times during Casanova were quite wonderful. I had a wonderful house with a pool and a vineyard that produced 2000 bottles of wine a year. I think we drank the 2000 within the first six months. The wine could get to the kitchen and no farther.

[Q] Playboy: While your European film-work was artistically important, it did not help put you back into the category of a "bankable" star. Didn't it take Ordinary People to do that?

[A] Sutherland: Well, you know, over the years I've never stopped working, and to me I was never so much building a career as working on things that were important to me. It was more important to work with greats like Schlesinger, Fellini and Bertolucci and Redford. I had a lot of bad luck with some of my pictures. But I'd say, yes, Ordinary People was a completely wonderful thing to have been part of. Redford, he's a genius. Every note in that film was right. The fact that the movie moved my image to something more like what I wanted made the whole experience even better.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you were ambivalent at first about doing the movie, weren't you?

[A] Sutherland: Well, originally, they had wanted me for the psychiatrist. I wanted to play the father. I knew Bob Redford would be a terrific director--it would be impossible for a man as sensitive as he not to be. But it was a weird deal. They weren't going to pay me money up front--just a percentage of the film. I was strapped for money. I was so strapped, in fact, that earlier I had refused a percentage of Animal House in exchange for cash up front for my small role in that movie. God, what a mistake! If I had taken the percentage, I'd now be richer than Croesus. Well, who cares? It doesn't matter. I live with a huge-debt mentality, anyway. There are debts still from my marriage to Shirley, debts that old.

So, anyway, the percentage aspect of the deal didn't appeal to me. And when the offer came, I happened to be in Montreal at an Expos game. Now, I dearly love the Expos. Along with sports cars, they are the great passion of my life. So my agent had me paged in the stadium and said that, yes, indeed, Redford wanted me for Ordinary People but that I had to give him an answer right away. I said, "I can't give you an answer now. The Expos are losing to Chicago. I'll call back after the game." Well, by the seventh inning, the Expos had scored four runs and all was right with the world. So I called California and said, "Yeah, I'll do it."

[Q] Playboy: Lucky thing the Expos scored those runs.

[A] Sutherland: Yeah. Lucky thing.

[Q] Playboy: How was Redford to work with as a first-time director?

[A] Sutherland: He was brilliant and beautiful--and so easy. Usually, when I start a film, I'm always awkward with the director the first few days. But with Bob, the first few days were much easier. He surrounds actors with a great deal of affection. And I knew things would be right from the first rehearsals at Bob's house in Chicago. You know, there's an e. e. cummings poem that I have a huge affection for, somewhere I have never traveled. Well, I walked into Bob's bedroom, and I picked up an anthology of Cummings' work, and the book fell open to a page Bob had folded over. And it was that poem. It was an omen for the kind of cooperation and understanding that we had in Ordinary People.

You know, after we had shot that last scene where Calvin Jarrett tells Beth through his tears, "I'm not sure I love you anymore," I felt that the way I had done it just wasn't right for the character, for what happened to him next. Bob didn't agree. The film editor didn't agree. They thought the take was terrific. I wanted Calvin to be calmer, less hysterical. Well, Bob had enough faith in my sense of it to later hire a complete studio, reconstruct the set and reshoot the scene. By that time, Mary Tyler Moore was already in New York, playing in Whose Life Is It, Anyway?, so we reshot the scene with Bob offcamera delivering Mary's lines. And that's what Bob went with--that's what you see in the movie.

[Q] Playboy: Does it bother you that every other major actor and the director in Ordinary People was nominated for an Oscar--except for you?

[A] Sutherland: No.

[Q] Playboy: Come on.

[A] Sutherland: It bothers me only in terms of Bob Redford. There were people in Hollywood who gave him flak for casting me. When I wasn't nominated, for a second I felt a twinge of: Maybe Bob will see this as a criticism of his choice.

[Q] Playboy: For a man who says he needs to be liked as much as you do, not to be nominated must be wounding.

[A] Sutherland: There were a lot of good people who weren't nominated--and there were a lot of marvelous actors who were. Besides, I never thought I'd get nominated in the first place. I didn't get nominated for Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust, and I didn't get nominated for Fellini's Casanova. It doesn't make a big difference to me. It's the performance that counts--and how the director and the audience feel about my work. Audiences loved that movie, and they loved Calvin Jarrett.

[Q] Playboy: What about the critics? They were extremely respectful of you in Ordinary People.

[A] Sutherland: True. But they hadn't always been. Pauline Kael . . . Pauline Kael. Now, she's a very interesting writer. Well, Pauline Kael reviews The Day of the Locust and she says, "There's nothing specifically wrong with Donald Sutherland's performance. It's just awful." That was the most destructive, stupid piece of criticism I've ever received. What do you do with something like that? I stopped reading reviews after that.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned earlier passing up an opportunity to take a lucrative percentage of a movie. Have you ever handled money well?

[A] Sutherland: I'm always broke. I have no idea why. It may be a legacy of my childhood, but I don't live a very squirrel-like existence. There are enormous debts that I ran up when I was with Shirley. I'm certainly not poor, but I seem to keep only about 15 percent of what I make on a picture. Between United States taxes, Canadian taxes, California taxes, my corporation taxes, my attorneys, my accountants, my agents--well, I end up with 15 or 16 percent. I spend a lot of money when I have it. My expenses are astronomically high. Living at hotels is expensive. There are people in my organization I support. A nice bottle of wine costs. Francine and I bought a house in Los Angeles and we paid $900,000 for it.

[Q] Playboy: Since Ordinary People, have you tried to avoid bizarre characters in choosing your roles?

[A] Sutherland: Well, in Threshold, I play Dr. Vrain, who's modeled somewhat on Dr. Denton Cooley. And, yes, my character is a decent, dedicated, brilliant, wonderful surgeon. But in my next movie, Eye of the Needle, I play a Nazi killer. So, no, I play each part according to the needs of the director. I pick my parts because they interest me. There's no strategy. Otherwise, I wouldn't have chosen to do Lolita on Broadway last winter.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you take the role in Lolita in the first place?

[A] Sutherland: I was living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Chicago that attacked me and it caused Lolita to happen.

[Q] Playboy: You'd better elaborate on that.

[A] Sutherland: It's simple, really. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the house I was temporarily living in while we were filming Ordinary People in Chicago. From what I understand, he was having an affair with the wife of the man he was designing the house for. That man was very tall. So Wright, who was short and vain, designed the house in such a way that a tall person couldn't live in it without severe cranial damage. I hit my head all the time. It drove me crazy. Well, one day the phone rang and I smashed my head and landed flat on my back, clutching the phone. It was a young agent saying that, on my behalf, he was turning down the Humbert Humbert role in a new Edward Albee play of Lolita, because those were his instructions. I was in such a foul mood I was looking to get back at anybody, so I yelled at the agent not to turn clown the play.

[Q] Playboy: And in retrospect?

[A] Sutherland: In retrospect, it would have been better if I'd been knocked out cold.

[Q]Playboy: There was a lot of conflict reported about that play, which closed in one week. Why?

[A] Sutherland: The fault really was with the way the play was written--and also produced. Edward Albee is fundamentally an antiheterosexualist and he had the feeling that unless Lolita's mother was ugly, people wouldn't understand why Humbert Humbert is attracted to Lolita. Which is bullshit. Shirley Stolar, who is a wonderful actress, was really miscast--and turned into a sight gag. I protested that. Anyway, the play closed and I had my first vacation in a quarter of a century.

[Q] Playboy: So it's been nice to take a break.

[A] Sutherland: Yes, it was unplanned, unscheduled--and thoroughly delicious. Francine hasn't had me around for such a long time in years, and she says she likes it. For the past few months, I've done nothing except see my family, watch the Expos play, sail my boat and go for frequent sessions with a Playboy interviewer. All of it has been very, very pleasant. You know, until we did this, until today, I never thought a psychiatrist could be used for a thinking process. I've discovered a lot of things for myself. It isn't normal, because I don't usually open up so much in interviews. But this time, partly because of the amount of work that's gone into it and partly because of the vulnerable phase I'm in, it's turned out to be interesting.

[Q] Playboy: Is it strange for a work-obsessed person to spend a few months without work?

[A] Sutherland: The basic feeling is good. Although my lawyer very ominously told me he was going to talk to me about my cash flow today. So I don't know. But the vacation is nice. I mean, I love acting; but there's something about it that is madness. I don't know why that's true, but I haven't not acted in a quarter of a century, and it has affected me. I can now feel layers peeling off, and I like the person who's living underneath. When you're working as an actor, you can't be yourself. A farmer can work his land and still be himself while he's farming. That's why I think acting is crazy. I need to do it, but it's crazy. It isn't normal.

[Q] Playboy: There goes that word normal again. It's important to you, isn't it? You said toward the beginning of this interview that being ordinary was an obsession for you as a child.

[A] Sutherland: Oh, I don't know for sure. Normal? Normal? What does it mean? In the Fifties, in Canada, it was very important to be a normal kid. But most of my life, I've felt a lot like Homer Simpson in The Day of the Locust. Overbig, innocent, unlovable, out of the mainstream, not normal. As a kid, what I really was obsessed with was executions, with death. Well, now, in the past three years, I don't feel like Homer Simpson at all. Basically, I stopped thinking I was going to be executed.

[Q] Playboy: Why would anyone execute you? For not being normal?

[A]Sutherland: Maybe. But the fact is that three years ago, my life began to fit together. Let me backtrack a little to when we began this interview a month ago. I told you that my life felt good because I was winning all this approval--but the truth is that my life feels good because I'm getting hold of my whole person and containing him. My work life, my street life, my family life, they've become one full thing. That fragmentation that Jane used to talk about has disappeared. The other day, Fellini told me how relaxed I am these days. Well, this wholeness leads to a kind of self-acceptance. What it comes clown to is that I'm getting closer and closer to someone I'd be content to die with. Do you want to know what the most truthful thing about me is?

[A] Playboy: Sure.

[A] Sutherland: It's this: All I want for my life now is that when people read this, the baseball strike will be settled and the Montreal Expos will be headed for the world series. If that happens, everyone can know that I'm peaceful, happy and optimistic. If it doesn't, I'll be sitting alone on my sailboat somewhere, in a state of despair.

"In the early Sixties, the roles I played were often homicidal maniacs--but artistic homicidal maniacs."

"I don't mind surrendering will. I mean, I know, sexually that's what I do--I hat's part of what I do."

"When I'm acting, I'm kind of a concubine to the director. What I have to do is satisfy him."

"I was death-obsessed. As a kid, I could tell you about how long it took Ethel Rosenberg to die in the electric chair, how a man looks after he is hanged."

" 'Ordinary People' was a completely wonderful thing to have been part of. Redford, he's a genius. Every note in that film was right."

"The fault with 'Lolita' really was with the way the play was written--and also produced. Edward Albee is fundamentally an antiheterosexualist."