At the back end of the 1980s, I was invited to interview Donald Sutherland at the National Film Theatre in London for a Guardian event. The format was quite simple: show some clips, welcome the star on stage, ask some questions, then throw it open to an eager audience.
However, in the weeks leading up to the event, I had a number of calls from Sutherland – “I’m on my car phone in Canada driving in a snowstorm” – apparently agonising about the evening’s traditional arrangement.
Finally it clicked for this great actor, no stranger to quirky roles: he would come on stage first (to gales of applause) and then introduce me. Which he did, to, unsurprisingly, the audience’s utter bemusement. The rest of the evening went swimmingly.
Quentin Falk
In the late 1950s, when Donald Sutherland was a penniless actor in his early days in Britain, he read what was still the Manchester Guardian. Each day’s pair of horseracing tips on its sports pages proved so successful that he was able to get by on his winnings.
David Rennie
