Film Studies: If it's the eye of the hurricane you want, I know just the chap...

There are moments in movies when everyone involved (if they are in their right minds) comes upon a scene so demented that they say, "See if Donald Sutherland is available." For veterans know Sutherland can take a scene so over the top, so daft, so clichéd and bring it down to earth. He finds a level of matter-of-fact, ordinary behaviour so that, maybe, nobody will notice the craziness. Or, take the same scene, and this time sweep away the seasoned professionals who know it's daft. Imagine instead a firebrand director, as crazy as the material. "What we need," he whispers to his associates, "is someone who can own the screen for a few minutes, someone who brings this extraordinary authority, his own smiling madness. See if Donald Sutherland is free!"

About two-thirds of the way into Oliver Stone's JFK, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) goes to the Mall in Washington to meet "X", a tall man in a hat and coat, and as cool as a cucumber with miles of talk like this: "In November '63, one week after the murder of Vietnamese President Diem in Saigon, and two weeks before the assassination of our president a strange thing happened. I was sent by my superior officer, call him Y, to the South Pole as the military escort for a group of international VIPs..."

The delicious thing about that speech, and the whole scene of which it is part, is that Sutherland does not play "X" as a ranting paranoid. No, he's like someone sitting next to you at a baseball game, idly reminiscing over things. It's the tranquil, amused tone that is so lovely, so intriguing and human, and just about enough to stop you walking out of the theatre. Sutherland has been a lead actor sometimes, and for myself I would go to see anything just because he's in it (even the latest version of Pride and Prejudice, where he is Mr Bennet). But I think the real insight into his work is that he is a great supporting actor.

Even in Klute, one of his great starring roles, he had the intelligence to see that Jane Fonda's scared prostitute was the voice and the nervous system of the picture, and even though his character was crazy about her his mournful, hopeless way of watching her (for Klute is a country boy and a nerd) could only add to her reasons for being scared. There you are again: if you have a half-creepy, half-sinister lover, send for Donald Sutherland.

In The Dirty Dozen, one of those mid-Sixties films that drew attention to his wicked grin and his sarcastic voice, he had this great moment where he pretended to be a visiting officer. It might have been played broadly, but Sutherland found a weird, shy grace for it. And then in M.A.S.H, where he and Elliott Gould were the two surgeons who kept talking about anything except surgery, he and Gould caught the idea of friendship magically. Indeed, they offered a way of carrying off lead parts (as if you didn't notice that you were the lead) that was crucial to the Seventies.

He could be lurid, mad and a shocking vision - that's the way he played Casanova for Fellini; that's how he did the horrifically evil fascist in Bertolucci's 1900; that's how he did Homer Simpson in John Schlesinger's film of The Day of the Locust. But he was better yet as utterly ordinary men who had wandered into very strange narrative circumstances, in atmospheres that smelled of doom and decay, but where his heroes were supposed to stay smart, alert and rational. That's what he gave to Phil Kaufman's remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and that was the strength of intellect that he brought to Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now, where he is a patient, kindly, hopeful intelligence, whether he is following a small red figure in the streets of Venice or grappling silently with the extraordinary passion of Julie Christie.

These are just a few of the fine things Sutherland has done, without so much as an Oscar nomination. There is more: he was magnificent as Clark Clifford (playing opposite Michael Gambon's LBJ) in John Frankenheimer's TV film, Path to War; he was terrifying as a real madman in Backdraft; he was melodiously Irish in the fatuous The Eagle Has Landed; he was heartbroken yet chilly as the father in Ordinary People. He is over 70 now and he goes on and on. Indeed, he has provided at least one natural successor, Kiefer Sutherland, his son. One thing they share is the ability to invest nonsense and value with exactly the same gritty professional commitment. Such acting leaves it up to us to decide what is insane and what sound.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk