Donald Sutherland was a dream to interview – then he emailed me out of the blue

In 2015, just before the release of the fourth Hunger Games film, I sat down in a suitably craggy London hotel with Donald Sutherland, who starred as the tyrannical President Snow in the fantasy young-adult franchise. At the time, Sutherland had recently reconciled with his son Kiefer, AKA Jack Bauer from the thriller series 24: the two had little contact during the Kiefer’s early life, but had just shot a film together, a western called Forsaken, in which they played an estranged father and son trying to patch up old wounds.

By turns thoughtful and gregarious, Sutherland was a dream interviewee. But because every answer was a story – related in that leathery Canadian baritone – the conversation flew, and just as he was getting on to the subject of his relationship with his son, a PR leapt out of the wardrobe and declared our time was up.

A few days later, an email dropped into my inbox from someone calling themselves “Frank Racette”. It was Sutherland. (His widow is the Canadian actress Francine Racette.) The loose end in our conversation had clearly been nagging at him, so he’d written 700 words on the subject of Forsaken and fatherhood – recalling his time with Fellini, quoting Larkin, and recalling classic Hollywood gossip in the process. At the end, he’d attached a photograph of him and Kiefer together on set.

At the time, I was stunned. Nine years later, reading back his words, I find myself inexpressibly moved. Sutherland wrote as he talked as he acted – which is to say with a controlled yet sensual magnetism, and also an intuitive feel for the strange join-the-dots nature of human experience. You can’t walk away from a good Sutherland performance (or, as it turns out, email) without feeling that reality itself has been given a rattle, and its parts have fallen into some revealing new order – perhaps a comforting one, but more than likely not.

His lion-in-winter era yielded some tremendous work: not least that series of vital injections of gravitas and murk he gave to the Hunger Games franchise, and the fumbling paternal warmth he brought in the role of Mr Bennet to Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice. But it was his wolf-in-summer phase – Don’t Look Now, Klute, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day of the Locust, Ordinary People, Fellini’s Casanova – that made Sutherland an indelible presence for generations of cinema-goers.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve watched Don’t Look Now, but I’m still never quite prepared for the heart-splitting rawness of his performance as John Baxter – the bereaved father groping for solace in Venice, city of water and echoes, where every alley conspires to send him back to the anguish and grief only death can depose.

As the titular detective in Klute, meanwhile, Sutherland was so cautious and controlled that his character becomes as much of an enigma as the missing-person case he’s been brought to New York City to solve. In a twitchy, surveillance-led story, Sutherland positions himself as a consummate watcher and waiter, giving almost nothing to a city that’s liable to take everything you have.

In that hotel in 2015, I remember asking him about the possible snowballing effect of having played so many roles – whether from, say, President Snow he could disentangle strands of John Klute, John Baxter, Hawkeye Pierce, Matthew Bennell, Calvin Jarrett.

On the contrary, he said, it was nothing like that at all – and then the conversation veered elsewhere, and the thought was left incomplete.

In his email, he completed it.

“With respect to experience after all these years,” he wrote, “it’s akin to the affairs of Casanova. Every time he fell in love, and he fell in love a lot, it was the first time and the last time. He’s never been in love before.

“Time stopped. And then it started again. And then, after many liaisons, it was gone.”