Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in M*A*S*H, a ruthless Nazi spy in Eye of the Needle, a soulful father in Ordinary People and a strutting fascist in 1900, has died in Miami. He was 88.

His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media on Friday (AEST). CAA, the talent agency that represented Donald Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness”. He had a home in Miami.