'No, no, no, no!" As I ascend the stairs to Donald Sutherland's small and comfy two-storey beach-front apartment in Santa Monica, a hail of negatives floats down towards me in that warm and richly distinctive baritone. "No, goddamit, no!" I fear the actor's agent or manager is on the other end of the phone, receiving a full-bore, full-dress movie star shellacking. If this is how Sutherland treats the help, how's this going to go?
But the object of his wrath turns out to be a yappy Jack Russell pup, a protective breed renowned for its loyalty. This makes me, the intruder, the object of anxiety, and there is an interlude of disciplinary growling, from both Sutherland and the dog, before we settle down on two matching couches with an enviable view of the beach.
At 70, Sutherland is still an extraordinarily dapper and handsome man. Full head of thick, swept-back white hair. That lean and long face, the flesh still cleaving closely to the skull. The slightly wolfish sideways smile, surprising because of his mouth's relative narrowness in repose. On screen, that smile is a splendid pay-off, albeit one he rations for maximum effect, one of the primary tools in Sutherland's repertoire of actorly tricks, along with the voice and the height (at 6ft 4in, he looks like one of Sargent's elongated aristocrats), and, of course, what Jane Fonda has called "those droopy, pale blue eyes", which can warm you or freeze you, depending on the degree of villainy demanded by the part he's playing.
We're here to talk, initially at least, of Sutherland's new movie, a sumptuous and highly engaging adaptation of Pride And Prejudice by director Joe Wright. As he spreads his lean frame back on the couch, the Jack Russell now dozing beside him, I tell him that I was initially sceptical about his being chosen to play Mr Bennet, patiently enduring the amatory tribulations of his brood and the nattering of his tightly wound missus.
He's sympathetic. "Joe Wright called me and I also had some trepidation along those lines but he said no, it would work. He had a very clear and specific idea of what he wanted to do. There's a book about Jane Austen that I read beforehand by Ruth Perry, who's an MIT professor, called Novel Relations. It's about kinship from the middle of the 18th century to the early 19th century, and what happens when you have that transition between consanguineal marriages and conjugal marriages - the one being decided by your family, and then later all the power moves over to the husband. And Joe really understood that angle. So if my Mr Bennet could in any way satisfy Ruth Perry, then I'd be really thrilled!"
And it works. For much of the movie, as in the novel, Mr Bennet is a formidable but quietly spoken figure who looms large and powerful, but mostly in the background - a calm, isolated outpost of beleaguered maleness in a swirling torrent of femininity. But in the movie's deeply satisfying final shot, with Keira Knightley as his daughter Lizzy, Sutherland issues up a small but indelible sigh of contentment - and that sunrise of a smile - on behalf of his newly happy child, and the impression is so subtly powerful that Sutherland's is the role one thinks of all the way home.
He's up against a memorable cast. Sutherland is delirious about his co-star Knightley - "she's just the most terrific actress. It was like working with a Zen Buddhist" - for whom this is a role not unlike Julie Christie's Bathsheba in Far From The Madding Crowd: the moment when a beautiful young starlet finally finds her confidence and breadth as an actor. Elsewhere, Jena Malone (from Donnie Darko) does some scene-stealing as the capricious Lydia, Matthew MacFadyen is an acceptably starchy Mr Darcy, and Brenda Blethyn burbles delightfully as Mrs Bennet.
So, twittering young ladies and a slightly dotty wife. Can't be all bad?
"It was delicious," he says wistfully, savouring the adjective, "and they all treated me like Papa. Just wonderful. At 70 years old, it would cheer anybody up."
I tell him that all my women friends sighed when I told them I was to interview him, and he gives me an exasperated, slightly embarrassed "get-outta-here" wave of his hands. "As Robert Redford once said to me, back when he was the sexiest man alive, 'Where were they when I really needed them?'"
Donald McNichol Sutherland was born in St John, New Brunswick, in 1934. He grew up in a Canada still umbilically joined to Mother England, and overseen by governor general Baron Tweedsmuir (better known as John Buchan, author of The 39 Steps). Sutherland's first part-time job was as a local news correspondent, aged 14, and he later graduated from the University of Toronto, where he was a member of the UC Follies comedy troupe. In 1958, intent on becoming an actor, he migrated, along with half a generation of Canadian actors and directors, to England.
"I should have been at RADA. I think I would have been very happy there, but I was at LAMDA, and I left after the first year of a three-year course and immediately went to work, did one audition for the Perth Repertory Theatre, and stayed there for several years."
He was a regular Guardian reader. "I used to read it in the late 50s, back when it was still the Manchester Guardian. You know there was a guy - I can't remember his name - on the sports pages and he used to give out two horses' names every day. And I made so much money off his tips that in the end my bookie refused to take my bets! It's so weird that the best tipster was in the Guardian, of all places."
Sutherland made his TV debut in 1962, in an episode of The Saint, the first of three appearances. Later he was in all the musty old spies-and-intrigue TV thrillers of the time: Gideon's Way, Man In A Suitcase, The Avengers, usually playing twitchy and weird, with a villainous foreign accent.
Was he conscious of being an unusual actor?
"Well, I was always cast as an artistic homicidal maniac. But at least I was artistic!"
He made his film debut in Freddie Francis's fondly remembered trash-horror flick Dr Terror's House Of Horrors and in his fellow Canadian Silvio Narizzano's Die! Die! My Darling! alongside Tallulah Bankhead, whose last movie it was, and who made a lasting impression on Sutherland. "I loved her. She was wonderful. But poor Yootha Joyce [her co-star] couldn't run fast enough. Tallulah had this wild crush on her. I'd just left the theatre at this time and once I was downstairs putting on make-up. My character was supposed to be an albino and I didn't think he was white enough, so I was down in the basement, putting layers on. And I heard a noise behind me. I turned around and Tallulah was standing there naked, with dugs hanging down like that and this HUGE thatch of blond pubic hair and she looked at me and said, "What's the matter, darling? Never seen a blonde before?" I couldn't speak. And she ran out of there laughing madly, her bum swinging back and forth."
In 1964, he appeared in a BBC production of Hamlet, playing Fortinbras, with fellow Canadian Christopher Plummer as the Prince, Robert Shaw as Claudius, Michael Caine as Horatio, and Roy Kinnear and Steven Berkoff in lesser roles. He has a sudden, slightly awestruck flashback to the ferocious Robert Shaw.
"Shaw! He was something else. He died so young and so in character. He was being driven somewhere in Ireland, and he started to have his heart attack and he jumped out of the limo, literally running away from death, throwing up as he goes, running through a field. It was just exactly the way he was when he was alive, very fierce and combative. He was like John Cassavetes that way."
Although London during this period was the undisputed world capital of the 1960s, Sutherland was never at the top table, success-wise. "I had no money at all back then. I was later paid $600 a week for The Dirty Dozen, which was lovely, after having no money for years. But even with no money you could still go to places like the Scotch Club and, you know, John Lennon might be sitting right over there, but I was certainly not a part of any of that circle. I was truly peripheral.
"I had a kind of meandering little career, and then I was given a chance to play one of the bottom six in The Dirty Dozen. I originally had one line in the whole film - 'Number two, sir!' Then one day we were all around this big table. Telly Savalas, Clint Walker, John Cassavetes, Robert Ryan, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, really extraordinary guys. And Clint Walker got up and said, 'I don't think it's appropriate for me, as a star in Hollywood, and a representative of the Native American people, to play this stupid scene where I pretend to be a general.' And the director Robert Aldrich, who had a huge authoritarian streak, turned to me - we'd all had our heads shaved - and said, 'You! With the big ears! You do it!' He didn't even know my name!"
And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the last anyone heard of Clint Walker. And the first time everyone took note of Sutherland, doing his backward psycho-farmboy thing and ending act one of his career. The next role he found would change everything.
"Ingo Preminger [the producer brother of director Otto] saw that scene in Dirty Dozen and he cast me in M*A*S*H before he had a director. Then Robert Altman came aboard and tried to fire me, but Ingo wouldn't let him."
So there was some strife with Altman?
"Not too much, though there's a certain amount of rancour and bitterness when someone tries to fire you. But I had come from a different kind of tradition. I didn't even know what smoking dope was. [Altman was and is a champion pothead.] I literally didn't know what the smell was. I thought it was smoke-effects stuff for the movie! We used to have the rushes screened every night, back before digital, and it was always a big party in the screening room. It was a family feeling and, regrettably, I was never able to make myself a part of that family. I was much more rigorous and rigid and less loosey-goosey than Bob's regular people."
And it was a chaotic shoot. "On M*A*S*H they had an old-school camera guy from Disney, 65 or so, and that was a brilliant move. Altman brought him in specifically and it imposed a kind of discipline. I say 'a kind' because we never shot the same words twice. We'd do one take, and the next, and none of them were the same. The sound editor won an Oscar for figuring it all out." Amazingly, given it's the movie that made him an instant countercultural icon, Sutherland confesses he has never seen M*A*S*H* all the way through.
M*A*S*H* was released while Sutherland was shooting Kelly's Heroes, in which he played the second world war's only hippy tank commander, the scene-stealing Oddball, forever imploring his anachronistically hirsute sidekicks "not to bring me any of those negative waves early in the morning, man!" By now he was based in Los Angeles and married to Shirley Douglas, mother of Kiefer (born in London in 1966) and herself the daughter of Canadian socialist politician Tommy Douglas. Shirley and Donald were soon deeply involved with Hollywood's left wing, throwing benefits for the Black Panthers, hanging out with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Jon Voight and Bert Schneider, of the legendary production company BBS, which bankrolled Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show.
This was at a time when the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO was at its height, working hard to undermine the left in general and the Black Panthers in particular. Sutherland remembers his co-star Clint Eastwood, soon to become Hollywood's most visible rightwinger (albeit of the Main Street, relatively sufferable stripe) approaching him on the Yugoslavian set of Kelly's Heroes with a big shit-eating grin on his face, bursting with bad news. "He said, 'We just heard that Shirley's been arrested in LA for trying to buy hand grenades for the Panthers from an undercover FBI agent - and she tried to pay him with a personal cheque!' At which point Clint just fell on the ground laughing and could hardly stand up!" Shirley had been arrested, but was never charged.
As Sutherland's star ascended over the next couple of years - especially after he befriended Jane Fonda while making Klute - anti-Vietnam war politics began to fill his life off the set. I raise the subject of Cindy Sheehan's protest outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, and how suddenly everything on the home front is starting to look a lot like 1971 all over again. Even Fonda has announced she will henceforth be a lot more vocal in her denunciations of Bush's Iraq policy, deepening the deja vu, time warp factor. We digress on to the subject of Bush henchman Karl Rove - whose name fills Sutherland with what looks like deep nausea and dread - and his satanic plans to repeal the New Deal, and (give him enough time) the entire Enlightenment. "I just can't think of that man without ..." and he trails off. There are no words.
Fonda and the Sutherlands became deeply involved with Vietnam Veterans Against The War, the morally unimpeachable equivalent, during Vietnam, of Sheehan's Gold Star Families For Peace. (Sutherland was there on the day in 1970 when Fonda and John Kerry appeared on the same podium in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to denounce the war. Pictures from that day were doctored during the 2004 presidential campaign to make it look as though Kerry and Fonda had been sitting together - they were not).
Together with actors Peter Boyle and Howard Hesseman, Fonda and Sutherland decided to put together a revue called FTA ("Free The Army") and took it on the road to coffee houses near prominent American army and naval bases. Although the Pentagon instantly declared the shows off-limits to troops, the servicemen, mainly draftees, who called the show "Fuck The Army", came anyway and cheered long and hard. Fonda and Sutherland appeared in one sketch as Dick and Pat Nixon, and the memory puts a wicked smile on Sutherland's face. He recalls one night when the celebrity crowd showed up in furs and diamonds, Elizabeth Taylor and others hooting along with the khaki grunts. There was even a movie of the show, co-written, co-produced and co-directed by Sutherland - though good luck tracking down a copy.
Although this was the period of Sutherland's greatest renown, he believes he made an endless series of bad decisions about his career. "Everything was my fault. I was so dumb. But if I hadn't made the mistakes I made, I wouldn't have met the wonderful woman I've been married to for over 30 years, so I guess that makes the mistakes OK." (He and Shirley divorced in 1971, and he married the French-Canadian actor Francine Racette after meeting her on the set of Alien Thunder; they have three grown-up sons.)
He continues. "I mean, John Boorman came and virtually lived with me for two weeks and tried to persuade me to play the role that Jon Voight played in Deliverance. James Dickey [who wrote the book] was on the phone every day - but I don't want to do it because it was" - he mocks himself slightly - "violent. Oh please ... And Straw Dogs - Sam Peckinpah wanted me to do that, and I ended up doing Paul Mazursky's Alex In Wonderland and I was sooooo wrong for that."
Wasn't that when you first met Fellini?
"Oh, yes," he says, with another sly smile of pleasure and mischief.
I have a great quote from him about you, I say. This is Fellini defending his choice of you to play Casanova to one of his partners: "No, I need him. He's a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator!"
My tape recorder records an explosion of laughter from Sutherland that lasts a gratifyingly long time. "Oh God, oh God! You have to send me that, full quote and source. Let me give you my email!" He hasn't heard it before, and is off to Venice soon for a screening of the restored version of Casanova, so this is priceless.
Despite his doubts about his 1970s work - which included turning down an Antonioni movie in order to help his troubled M*A*S*H* co-star Elliott Gould to make the bomb called S*P*Y*S - Sutherland turned in a range of fine performances as the decade ticked by. There is his grieving father in Don't Look Now; his backward rube - Homer Simpson by name - in John Schlesinger's underrated The Day Of The Locust ("one of my favourite roles, because I played him exactly as I was aged 13") and his psychopathic fascist Attila in Bertolucci's 1900, raping a boy and then dashing his brains out on a wall. "I read Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology Of Fascism to prepare for that, but Bernardo said, 'OK, let's do it your way and my way' - and that never works in the actor's favour." He moved back and forth between these more eccentric performances and his quieter, Klute-like roles, such as his depressed father in Ordinary People. Occasionally he did a day's work for John Landis, who'd been a gofer on Kelly's Heroes: hence his unlikely participation in The Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House.
"Landis phones up and says, 'I'm gonna do this movie for Universal called Animal House, and they want to give you two-and-a-half per cent of the profits.' And I said, 'No way!' I've got to have my daily salary every day. So I got paid for one day's work and threw away two million dollars! I remember sitting at the premiere with my friend Hannah Weinstein and both of us saying, 'Nah, this'll never work!' " For a man who turned down two mill, he's laughing pretty heartily as he remembers.
As he entered his 50s in the early 1980s, Sutherland reoriented himself as a busy character actor, picking choice roles once in a while, but also spinning his wheels for much of the decade. The 1990s saw him evolve into a sort of "character actor-star", the kind of performer who can cherry-pick the meatiest supporting roles and still leave a permanent impression. His Mister X in JFK; his father in Six Degrees Of Separation. He also edged into TV, knocking out a Simpsons cameo and even playing Kiefer's dad on 24.
But his finest role in recent years was as presidential adviser Clark Clifford, opposite Michael Gambon's explosive LBJ, in John Frankenheimer's Path To War, fortuitously first broadcast as Bush lied his way into Iraq. The parallels were impossible to miss. Self-delusion. Quagmire. Sutherland's slow, horrified head-turn as LBJ announces his decision not to run for re-election is a 10-second lesson in all the things that make Donald Sutherland a great actor.
And thankfully he's keeping busy, currently working 16-hour days playing the Senate Majority Leader in a new TV series by Rod (The Contender) Lurie called Commander-in-Chief, starring Geena Davis as the first woman president. And he has Robert Towne's adaptation of John Fante's Ask The Dust in the pipeline, and asks me to look out for Land Of The Blind, a film about dissidents in a future totalitarian society.
At the end of the afternoon, Sutherland escorts me to the gate, his Jack Russell quite friendly now. "Now be sure and email me that Fellini quote," he says. He spins on his heel and walks back to the house, chuckling: "The eyes of a masturbator!"
Postscript: I had resolved not to ask Sutherland about his famous and beautiful sex scene with Julie Christie in Don't Look Now, as I'm sure it is everyone's first and most tiresome question. But the next morning a lengthy and very amiable email turns up. So I'll let Donald himself finish:
"About Don't Look Now, we shot that love scene in a room in the Bauer Grunwald early one morning with Nick Roeg and Tony Richmond operating two un-blimped Arriflex cameras and a bunch of wires going to the technicians on the other side of the closed door. An un-blimped Arri makes a noise like a huge sewing machine. Two of them operating together are deafening. Julie and I lay side by side on the bed, Nick yelled instructions. 'ZZZZZZZ Donald, kiss Julie's breast, ZZZZZZZZZZZ Julie, tilt your head back ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ Julie, come ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. That's how it was for about three hours. What made the scene wonderful to people was the editing. Never staying on us for more than a few seconds and then cutting to the two of us getting dressed, back and forth, the audience never ended up being a voyeur, they watched a cinematic collage and were reminded of themselves. That's what made it sexy and remembered; it was about them, the viewer, not about us, Julie and me. That's why it seems so real to everyone. It was real in their imagination. It had happened. To them though, not to us, we were just a catalyst for their imagination."
· Pride And Prejudice is released on September 16.
