> Zed Book Club / Donald Sutherland, 88, to Detail His Journey to Hollywood Fame in Long-Awaited Memoir
Donald Sutherland attends the 'The Burnt Orange Heresy' premiere during the 15th Zurich Film Festival at Kino Corso, 2019, Switzerland. Photo: Ferda Demir/Getty Images for ZFF/Getty Images
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Donald Sutherland, 88, to Detail His Journey to Hollywood Fame in Long-Awaited Memoir
The Canuck screen legend's first-ever autobiography will hit Canadian bookshelves on Nov. 12. / BY Andrew Wright / March 27th, 2024
Donald Sutherland is finally letting us in.
The Canadian screen legend – who celebrates his 89th birthday this July – is set to release his first autobiography, Made Up, But Still True, detailing his life before making it big and his extraordinary 60-year career in Hollywood.
Viking Canada, an imprint of Penguin Canada, will publish the book on Nov. 12.
“Donald Sutherland has made an indelible mark on Hollywood since his life-changing role in The Dirty Dozen catapulted him into the public eye for the next sixty years,” the publisher said in a press release on Wednesday, announcing the upcoming memoir. “With his raw honesty and wicked sense of humour, the renowned actor is finally chronicling his life in Made Up, But Still True, a generation-defining book that catalogs with powerful detail his far too many brushes with death, his complicated relationship with his parents, and behind-the-scenes stories of the movies he’s starred in, including M*A*S*H, Klute, Kelly’s Heroes, Don’t Look Now, Ordinary People, JFK, The Eye Of the Needle, Fellini’s Casanova, 1900, The Hunger Games, and more.”
Sutherland – who is also the father of actors Kiefer and Rossif Sutherland, producer Angus Sutherland, production manager and producer Rachel Sutherland and Roeg Sutherland, who works for Creative Artists Agency – began his on-screen acting career in the early 1960s, achieving his breakthrough role in Hollywood in the aforementioned 1967 Second World War classic The Dirty Dozen. His next big break was a starring role as Hawkeye Pierce in MASH (1970), which he followed up with his turn as an absent-minded tank commander in Kelly’s Heroes the same year.
From there he would go on to work with some of the brightest directors of the time including Nicolas Roeg in Don’t Look Now (1973) and Federico Fellini in Fellini’s Casanova (1976).
Later work would see Sutherland show off his range, including his role as the demented arsonist in Backdraft (1991) and the cold and calculated authoritarian president in the Hunger Games film series (2012-2015).
His six-decades-long career has earned him a Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Critics Choice Award, and an Honorary Academy Award as well as places on the Hollywood and Canada Walks of Fame and an Order of Canada.
Meanwhile, to say Sutherland had “many brushes with death” is not an exaggeration on the publisher’s part. Born in Saint John, Sutherland survived a series of childhood diseases, including infantile paralysis, rheumatoid fever and spinal meningitis.
But no matter how dark the subject matter gets, readers shouldn’t expect much bleakness from the new offering, which the publisher says “is deeply insightful, emotional, and often very funny.”
In fact, if the Canuck screen icon’s view on later life is any indication, we can likely look forward to a heavy dose of inspiration in the pages of his long-awaited memoir.
“There is a hopefulness in being old, you know? I mean, if you get out there a little bit,” he told Zoomer in a 2018 interview about his role in The Leisure Seeker alongside fellow acting legend Helen Mirren. “If you stick yourself in a corner and don’t move, you stay in a chair, it just gets worse and worse. I’m 83 years old and I work. And I work because it’s a passionate endeavour. And if older people do that kind of thing and do some level of passionate work … I don’t know what it’d be like to retire, but I guess just so long as you don’t give up.”