There are some actors you can’t help loving. Not many, but the late Donald Sutherland was definitely one.

Just to see that narrow, bony face on-screen — with the long Stan Laurel chin and the big ears and the pale blue eyes that could be kindly or crazy, warm or cold, humorous or sinister — was to feel better at the movies. His presence alone helped me get through The Hunger Games. It was a pleasure to watch an old pro like him delicately snipping roses in the garden and exuding restrained, intellectual menace as the American dictator-president Coriolanus Snow. And it was touching to read that he hoped the very popular Hunger Games and its sequels might help spark a political youth movement to confront the dire state of the nation. It wasn’t so far-fetched an idea to an actor who’d been young and politically engaged when there was still a belief that film movements such as Third Cinema and more mainstream cycles of political modernism could play an important role in revolutionary struggle.

Sutherland wasn’t just a great actor, always interesting even in mediocre crap; he was one of ours, a lefty, with a period of intense anti–Vietnam War organizing to his credit. In the early 1970s, the start of the defining ten years of his stardom, he toured with Klute costar Jane Fonda in a traveling roadshow called FTA (Fuck the Army), which put them on the national security radar for years to come. FTA was a profane alternative to Bob Hope’s long-running USO show, meant to counter the rah-rah patriotism of the conservative Hope and his old-fashioned entertainment.