Better Actor: Donald Sutherland or Jonathan Pryce??

I've always preferred Pryce.

While Pryce is pretty good, yeah, Sutherland by a mile.

This is pretty much where I stand. I really like Sutherland but feel he’s more of a dependable or solid presence never bringing down anything he’s in. Price has his ups and downs but his work alone in The Two Popes was better than any Sutherland performance I’ve seen.

I feel like we are talking about a different Donald Sutherland .

The guy was one of the best actors of the 70's (and think about the calibre of actors in that decade). He did major, inventive, exciting work in both lead and supporting roles and is quite possibly the best actor to never have been nominated by the Academy. From Kelly's Heroes to M.A.S.H to Don't Look Now to Klute to Day Of The Locust to 1900 to The Great Train Robbery to Invasion Of The Body Snatchers to Ordinary People, Sutherland had one of the most underrated 10 years stretches of any actor ever. He was brilliant, but his brilliance was overshadowed somewhat by more iconic stars of that decade (Pacino, DeNiro, Hackman, Nicholson, Hoffman etc). It was a tough decade for a great actor to assert his authority in.In a just world (especially if he had gotten the 4 Oscar nominations he should have gotten in that stretch), he might be talked of as being part of that group, as opposed to being more of an afterthought.


Sutherland had a pretty steep decline as the 80's went on (poor choices in films led to him becoming a dependable character actor, but he lost a lot of his spark) and that maybe explains why his reputation didn't keep growing to the deserved stature of his earlier work. He had only a few interesting roles in the 90's to remind people of his talent (JFK, Six Degrees Of Separation), but for the most part, he didn't reach the heights of his work from 1970 to 1980 again. But his heights were such that I would say only he rivals Christopher Plummer as Canada's greatest living actor (I edge it to Plummer, because of stage).