From techno-thrillers, comedy to war movies his image is easily spotted on the screen. Tall lanky (6’4”) and intensely pale look he has played the villain that anyone would fear.
Sickly as a child, he suffered a series of potentially crippling diseases during his childhood, including polio and rheumatic fever. By the age of fourteen he was news / deejay for a local radio station where theatric readings honed his desire for acting. At the age of thirty he was staring in an Italian horror flick.
His acting began in the early sixties with parts in such TV series as The Avengers (1961), The Saint (1962), Gedeon’s Way (1965) and The Man in the Suitcase (1967).
His first movie role was in Fanatic (1965). Movies like Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and Billion Dollar Brain (1967 – about a super computer) were not the best titles for film stardom but that was to change.
Groundbreaking movies like The Dirty Dozen (1967) where a dozen convicted murderers are led on an assassination mission of German officers in World War II and MASH (1970) where he played the original Captain Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, M.D.
Donald Southerland married his first wife (1959-1966), Lois Hardwick, a Canadian actress whom he met while he attended University of Toronto. He married a second time (1966-1971) to Shirley Douglas, actress, whom he met during the filming of Castle of the Living Dead (1964) and they had twins, Kiefer Southerland (a dynamic actor himself) and Rachel (1966).
In 1972 while filming Alien Thunder, Donald met his third wife to be, actress, Francine Racette, they had two sons, Roeg (1974), Rossif (1978), and a daughter, Angus Redford (1978).
Heavy into the anti-war movement Donald met Jane Fonda, actress, in 1971 while filming Klute (1971). They had a three-year relationship and performed together in Free the Army (F.T.A, 1972) an antiwar revue that toured military bases in 1973. The movie Klute was a major role for Donald as a small-town detective searching for a missing man having only one lead connected with a New York prostitute (Jane Fonda).
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