The actor has died at age 88 on Thursday in Miami after a long illness.

Sutherland was never nominated for a competitive Oscar, though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences made up for the oversight by giving him an honorary statuette in November 2017.

His early characters, like crazed/dazed Pvt. Vernon Pinkley in The Dirty Dozen (1967), anti-Establishment Army medic Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970) and hippie tank commander Oddball in Kelly’s Heroes (1970), were all mavericks.

With his distinctive baritone and crystal blue eyes, Sutherland was effective in provocative roles, like the private eye who falls for a prostitute (then real-life romantic partner Jane Fonda) in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute (1971).

In Nicolas Roeg’s horror thriller Don’t Look Now (1973), he and Julie Christie tantalized audiences in one of the more torrid sexual sequences in movie history. He then starred for Fellini as Casanova in 1976.

Sutherland’s turn as the irreverent, martini-loving Hawkeye in M*A*S*H opposite Elliott Gould as “Trapper” John McIntyre brought him stardom at age 35.

“It showed the concept of war without showing war,” he said of  Altman’s film in 1970 interview for the CBC program Telescope. “When you are in a field station like we were, it is insane to watch human bodies come flying into camp that are wrecked for no reason at all. That kind of insanity created an environment, a mini-society that was in chaos. To a lot of people, that represents the society that we have today.”

Sutherland was empathetic as suburban Chicago lawyer trying to hold his family together in the Oscar winning Ordinary People (1980) and as compassionate doctor in Richard Pearce’s Threshold (1981). But he also played maniacal pyromaniac in Ron Howard’s Backdraft (1991).

“I wasn’t offered it,” he told GQ in 2014. “I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be part of it. I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s.

“I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them. But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.”

Sutherland also memorably played a man on the run in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a pot-smoking professor in Animal House (1978), French painter Paul Gauguin in The Wolf at the Door (1986) South African schoolteacher who changes his opinion about apartheid in A Dry White Season (1989).

Asked in 2017 profile for 60 Minutes about finding inspiration, Sutherland said: “I don’t find it. It finds me. I mean, I will read it. And suddenly, it starts churning around inside me. And, then, it gets violent. And, then, it gets loving. And it’s extraordinary thing. It gets more and more and more exciting. It’s delicious.”

Donald McNichol Sutherland was born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, New Brunswick. He had polio and then missed the fourth grade when he had to stay home with rheumatic fever. His father, Frederick, was a salesman and his mother, Dorothy, a mathematics teacher.

When he was 12, the family moved to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, and he attended Bridgewater High School and then University of Toronto, studying engineering and drama before graduating in 1958.

After working in regional theater in Ontario, he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art but dropped out after a year, then spent 5 years practicing his craft in English and Scottish repertory theaters.

“The next morning they were all on the phone saying how wonderful the audition had been. And then the producer said, ‘We loved you so much, we wanted to explain why we weren’t casting you. We’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”

He said he was self-conscious about his looks. When he asked his mom if he was handsome, she replied, “Your face has character.”

While in the play Spoon River Anthology, Sutherland was approached by producer Paul Maslansky about The Castle of the Living Dead (1964), a low-budget horror film shot in Italy. He played a soldier, a witch and an old man in that.

He then portrayed a lunatic in Hammer Films’ Die! Die! My Darling (1965), starring Tallulah Bankhead; showed up on British TV on The Saint and The Avengers; and spoke as mechanical voice on phone in Billion Dollar Brain (1967), starring Michael Caine as spy Harry Palmer.

In The Dirty Dozen, in one scene with Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan, Pvt. Pinkley pretends to be a general and inspects the troops. Sutherland got to do the comic bit after another actor declined. “You with the big ears, you do it,” director Aldrich said.

In another antiwar film, he portrayed Christ in Dalton Trumbo’s gut-wrenching Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

Director John Boorman implored him to play the part that went to Burt Reynolds in Deliverance (1972), but he turned him down.

In March 2018 interview with Vulture, Sutherland explained that his steamy scene with Christie in Don’t Look Now wasn’t as sexually charged as it appeared.

“We were in a room by ourselves,” he said. “I don’t know about Julie, but I’m never naked in front of somebody! I’m not even naked in front of my children. I’m naked in front of my wife — that’s it. I was shy. For very specific reasons, she was physically shy. But we got over our shyness, went into the room and were standing like Adam and Eve waiting for somebody to give us an apple.”

Sutherland once set up his own production company but quickly decided it wasn’t in his best interest. “For me, it’s better to find a director who wants to make a film,” he told Drama-Logue magazine. “To tailor something for someone is like grabbing a dog by the tail and walking him down the street.”

In 1995, he won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his performance as a Soviet cop in the HBO telefilm Citizen X. He played Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford in the 2002 HBO miniseries Path to War, and starred as an insidious Speaker of the House opposite Geena Davis as the U.S. president in the 2005-06 ABC drama Commander in Chief.

Sutherland found TV work on Dirty Sexy Money, The Pillars of the Earth, Crossing Lines, Ice, Trust (playing J. Paul Getty), The Undoing.

Sutherland was married to and divorced from actresses Lois Hardwick and Shirley Douglas (mother of Kiefer and his twin, Rachel) before he became romantically involved with Racette.

Kiefer was named for Warren Kiefer, the director of Castle of the Living Dead, and Roeg was named for Nicolas Roeg.

“I finally found peace in the words of Benjamin Kubelsky, also known as Jack Benny, when he said: ‘I don’t deserve this, but I have arthritis, and I don’t deserve that either.’”