There are at least seven people crammed into the dressing room at GMTV studios when I walk in - a Channel 4 publicist, a Disney publicist, a GMTV publicist, a producer, a manager, a researcher, me - all of us standing around in our drab blacks and greys. And then, there, unmistakably, in the middle of us, is Donald Sutherland.
Even at 72, he's still far and away the most commanding presence in the room. He looks magnificent, like a mountain lion, or an American president, perhaps, not any specific one, a generic American president, although it's one of the few roles he has still yet to play. It's mainly the hair, of course - a luxuriant snowy white mane swept off his face and accompanied by a neatly trimmed moustache. What I can't help wondering is if the latter part of Sutherland's career might have been very different without it. Disney's decision to cast him as the patriarch of a rich powerful family in Dirty Sexy Money, Channel 4's glossy new primetime drama serial, was a no-brainer. He's the patriarch of his own theatrical dynasty - all five of his children work in the movies in some shape or form, including his son by his second wife, Kiefer Sutherland, better known these days as Jack Bauer in 24. More importantly, he looks the part before he even opens his mouth.
When he does open his mouth, mind, my questions derail quite quickly. He's only in London for a few more hours. Just a whistle-stop tour, then, I say. Ha! How much I have to learn. 'Do you know what a whistle-stop tour actually is?' he says. Er, something to do with trains? And that's it, he's off on the history and etymology of whistle-stop tours and how the likes of Truman campaigned from the caboose at the back of a train.
Not that we're supposed to be talking about politics. 'They've told me not to,' he says enigmatically, although afterwards it strikes me that perhaps it isn't so enigmatic given that last time he commented on the Bush administration he called it one of the 'most mendacious governments in the history of the world'. This time around he confines himself to saying that the election is a 'once in a lifetime opportunity'. Have you come out in support of any of the candidates, I ask him. Yes, he says. On which side? 'The side of...um... purity.'
Which side is that, then?
'Purity only has one side.'
Hmm, I say. It becomes my refrain for the interview, followed closely by 'In what sort of way?' and 'How exactly do you mean?' Still, he's got a battery of alarming facts up his sleeve. 'Did you know that 54 per cent of all Americans believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago? That's 1,000 years after the Sumerians invented glue.' And: 'Do you know much about John Galsworthy?' Er... 'He was born in 1867. It's curious, you know, because he was 66 when he died and spent 33 years of his life in the 19th century and 33 in the 20th century. He went into his family's shipping business and on one ship he met the second mate. And do you know who that second mate is?'
Um...
'The second mate was Joseph Conrad. Gosh, eh, think of that!'
It's a bit like sitting an exam which I'm actually quite happy to fail. Because Sutherland, as well as being one of the cinematic icons of the Seventies, was also one of the great, if unlikely, sex symbols of the Seventies (when, as a teenager, he asked his mother if he was handsome, she hesitated and then replied, 'Donald to be perfectly truthful, no. But your face has a lot of character'). It's not unrelated, of course, to the fact that one of the most persistent movie rumours of modern times, namely that the famous sex scene in the middle of the 1973 thriller, Don't Look Now, starring him and Julie Christie, was no mere acting. More of this later, though. In the meantime there's still a melting effect in evidence when it comes to women. He's pre-recorded an interview for GMTV, and shortly before I'm due to meet him, a producer swooshes into the green room and gushes, 'I think that's the best interview we've ever done! He's so charming! And so generous! Oh, you're going to have a fabulous time.'
But then, an hour later, I find myself doing much the same to my editor on the phone. Because he is charming, and although, as Carol Shields once wrote, charm is just a cheap trick which anyone can do ('the calculated lift of the wrist... that trick of pretending to sit on a little glass chair, that concentration of radiance'), most people don't. The shame, of course, is that I didn't think of dropping a nice Carol Shields quote into my conversation at the time, instead of having to sit and admit to not knowing who Sam Harris or James Carville are (US political writer and pundit, respectively, it turns out), but then it's less a straightforward interview in the question-and-answer sense than a series of digressions-cum-Mensa test.
Still, I faithfully copy down his utterances, even though they verge on gnomic. When I ask him if there are any parallels between the situation now in Iraq and in the Sixties with Vietnam when he and his then girlfriend, Jane Fonda, toured the country with their FTA revue, popularly known as 'Fuck the Army', he says, 'There are parallels but not similarities'.
He won't elaborate, but who knows, he might be right; he certainly has the history to back him up. He's made 150 films in a career that has spanned almost half a century. One of his very first films was Tallulah Bankhead's last (Die! Die! My Darling!), his break came in The Dirty Dozen, which led to him being cast in M*A*S*H, and from there he's gone on to star in dozens of seminal and not-so-seminal films - Ordinary People, Klute, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, A Dry White Season, JFK. And now Dirty Sexy Money in which he plays Tripp Darling. The show is being tipped as the Dallas or Dynasty de nos jours which makes Sutherland its Josh Ewing, its Blake Carrington, though since he's still Donald Sutherland, he's head and shoulders above either of those, and so too, it turns out, the script.
In fairness, it's had mixed but more positive than negative reviews in the States. And Peter Krause, the amiable one from Six Feet Under, is equally amiable here, but personally I'm with the critic from the New Zealand Herald who this week asked: 'The question is not just what a class actor is doing in trash like this, but also whether Sutherland is actually in a different show entirely, one that somehow got cut into Dirty Sexy Money by mistake. His sad, jilted, intellectual rich man appears to be running his own Shakespearean tragedy in the middle of a glam-trash soap.'
Precisely. It's a bit like watching King Lear stumble onto the set of Footballers' Wives. Who knows? Maybe the show matures into itself, Sutherland himself is certainly passionate about the brilliance of its creator, Craig Wright, who was a writer on Six Feet Under, and who's a polymath in his own mould. When I ask him if he agrees with the show's tagline that money is the root of all evil, he says, 'No, that's just bullshit. I don't know who put that in. It wasn't Wright, not least because he would have known that, at least according to the James version, it's money is "at the root of all evil", which of course is quite different.'
Being rich is useful, he says, if you can do 'something astonishing like Bill Gates has done with the seed vault'. (Gates has helped to fund a doomsday store in the Arctic of seeds from every food crop on the planet.) He admires philanthropy: 'I've just never had enough money to do it.' In fact to hear it his way, he's not rich at all. Which is true in the Hollywood sense of the word, ie he doesn't make $25 million a movie; on the other hand, he does own homes in LA, Canada, New York and Paris. 'I have mortgages up to my armpit, though,' he says. And one of his best qualities is his willingness to own up to his mistakes. He insisted on taking a £30,000 fee for Animal House rather than a percentage of the profits, a decision that cost him millions when it went on to be a worldwide hit; he turned down Deliverance and Straw Dogs because he thought they were too violent; he told Nic Roeg that he thought that he really ought to change the ending of Don't Look Now to be a bit more upbeat; and that his wife, who wanted to produce it, was mad to think that La Cage Aux Folles would be a Broadway hit.
I assume that his decision to appear in Fool's Gold, a rom-com starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, which is released in the UK next month, has to have been for the money. In North America, it's been universally panned. 'Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates,' said the Toronto Globe and Mail. 'Any more than two writers on a movie usually spells trouble. On the other hand, that two of the three scribes responsible for Fool's Gold have previously specialised in horror makes perfect sense,' said the Washington Post. Only Sutherland has emerged with any sort of credit, although he rolls his eyes when I ask him about it. 'I got paid only a third of my salary fee, and instead of eight weeks' work they kept me for eight months. And walking down the street in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve I got an embolism in my lung. Nobody told me I was too old to scuba dive, for heaven's sake. I had to have a bronchoscopy; they thought it was lung cancer.'
It's infuriating, really. Who's advising him, for God's sake? He's worked with the greats: Federico Fellini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman, John Schlesinger, Nic Roeg, Alan J Pakula...and, now, Andy Tennant, or, as the critic from the Austin Chronicle put it, 'very possibly the worst director working in Hollywood today'.
He just seems to like saying yes, rather than saying no, which is maybe the real source of his charm. He's not so much sitting on the shiny chair as wanting to please.
But then it's still perhaps a source of amazement that he's here at all, the boy from the smallest of small towns, Bridgewater in Nova Scotia, who made it all the way to the top of the Hollywood tree; he's the American dream made flesh, except he's not even American. He's Canadian-born and Canadian-bred, his father a salesman, his mother the daughter of a Protestant minister, who went off to the University of Toronto to study engineering and whose first trip to the theatre, so the story goes, was to appear in a play. Later, he went to London to study at Lamda and then served his apprenticeship appearing in rep in Perth.
He still sprinkles the odd 'bloody hell!' into his speech but these days doesn't seem to belong anywhere. 'I pay taxes in LA,' he says. 'But I can't vote. And I spend a lot of time in Canada, but I can't vote there either.'
It's a funny part of his make-up, his Canadianness, a quality that apart from anything else has united all three of his wives: the first whom he met at university, Lois Hardwick, had been, remarkably enough, a child star of the silent movies. The marriage lasted seven years and then he met Shirley Douglas, the daughter of Tommy Douglas, a socialist politician who was the architect of Canada's welfare state. Shirley bore him twins, Rachel and Kiefer (named after Warren Kiefer, the pen name of Lorenzo Sabatini, who directed Castle of the Living Dead in which Sutherland made his film debut), and pursued radical politics - she was once arrested for raising money to buy hand grenades for the Black Panthers.
The marriage ended but not before his three-year-long affair with Jane Fonda had already begun. It was a fiery union, at the height of Fonda's Hanoi Jane days, although somehow he managed to escape the opprobrium of middle America (not being pictured sitting on the gun turret of a NVA anti-aircraft missile launcher perhaps helped). 'We got together shortly before we made Klute and then we were together until the relationship exploded and fell apart in Tokyo. And it broke my heart. I was eviscerated. I was so sad. It was a wonderful relationship right up to the point we lived together.' And then, in 1972, he met the French-Canadian actress Francine Racette.
Theirs has been one of the most enduring marriages in Hollywood. They've had three sons - Roeg, named after the director Nicholas Roeg, Rossif, after the French director, Frédéric Rossif and Angus Redford, after Robert Redford. Is it luck, I ask him, that you married the right woman? Or have you worked at it?
'I don't know... It's not something that you can communicate. She's an extraordinary human. She was courted by intellectuals. Jean-Paul Sartre? She was his actress. She was Frédéric Rossif's muse. I think it's like Joanne Woodward [actress wife of Paul Newman] said, "Beauty goes and sex goes but my husband makes me laugh every single day." And so does my wife. We laugh all the time.'
Forget the scene from Don't Look Now ('It bewilders me how anyone could think me and Julie were doing that for real, there were at least two other people in the room, it was Nic Roeg's artistic vision; it's all entirely in the editing, you don't see anything, you simply remember your own love-making'), it's this simple marital contentment that makes Sutherland, even at 72, still something of a sex symbol.
He quotes me a line from Dirty Sexy Money. '"I placed my life in your hands so that you could carry it safely to the grave." It's that, you see, and the finiteness of it, of knowing that life will end. It's why the happiest people are Buddhists who spend five minutes a day thinking about dying.'
Do you?
'Sure. I'm 72. So many of my friends have died. Tony? Anthony Minghella? What was he? 54? My brother-in-law died last week. And he was remarkably healthy with a nine-month baby.'
And then a stream of publicists and producers and managers all walk back in. He has one more TV interview and then he's off to Paris, where his wife and his Jack Russell await. He starts to unbutton his shirt and strip to his vest while still deep in conversation. 'Sorry,' he says, 'I couldn't hold my belly in any longer.' He finishes an anecdote about how he thought he was going to die of pancreatic cancer but it turned out to be a mistake and another about a piece by film critic David Denby on David Lean in the New Yorker, and then issues his last instructions to me even as I'm being led out of the room.
'You've got to get hold of yesterday's International Herald Tribune. Can you do that? Yes? Then read the leader by Maureen Dowd. Read it. That will tell you what you need to know.'
I will, I say. And I do. It's a spot of pro-Obama Hillary bashing, so no great shock there. Or have I missed the point, again? My final failure in the Great Sutherland General Knowledge Quiz. But then that's the great thing about being charmed - I don't even mind. Even though I'm the dunce. Bottom of the class. Unsure, still, exactly when the Sumerians invented glue.
Dirty Sexy Money is on Fridays on Channel 4
Donald in dates
17 July 1935 Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Studied engineering and drama at the University of Toronto, before moving to London to attend the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
1966 Marries his second wife, actress Shirley Douglas (two children, Rachel and 24 star Kiefer, pictured with his father, below right). Divorced 1970.
1967 Stars alongside Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson in The Dirty Dozen
1970 Plays 'Hawkeye' Pierce in M*A*S*H* and Sgt Oddball in Kelly's Heroes
1971 Co-stars with Jane Fonda for the first time, in Klute.
1972 Marries actress Francine Racette (three children, Roeg, Rossif and Angus Redford).
1973 Appears with Julie Christie in one of cinema's most famous sex scenes in Don't Look Now
1978 Takes the lead in an unnerving remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1991 Plays a conspiracy-fuelling intelligence officer in Oliver Stone's JFK
He says: 'I'm going to be working until I'm helping them with the shovel.'
They say: 'He's a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator.'
- Federico Fellini on why Sutherland was his perfect choice for the title role of Casanova (1976)
Matt Bolton
