Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an actor, if you've been to the cinema at all regularly over the past 30 years,

you've almost certainly seen him in something, the psychopath in the dirty dozen perhaps,

or the sensitive detective in Kluk detective include almost famously as

Hawkeye Pierce in Mash. His performances are always strong, clever and interesting.

An actor he says is there to be molded. Born in Canada, he started his career in England,

but moved to Hollywood in his early 30s.

Now he's back in the West End where he first appeared on stage in

1958, in a new play called Enigmatic Variations. The man who suffers

from stage fright has come back to where it all began because acting for him is something

he has to do to live. It is my life, he says. He is Donald Sutherland.

You've gone as far as to say, Mr Sutherland, that you would never stop acting even if somebody

paid you a million dollars. but why is it so necessary

or maybe for a million

but what is it it's obviously in your blood yes I don't know what it is it just it's

you let it go for a little bit and then it comes raging back and

compels me to to go do it again it's even though every time you go do it you can be

terribly sick can't you? You get stage fright.

Dreadful, just dreadful. Even making movies. People say we don't get sick

making. I said yeah the first that's why when I have it now in my contract,

Gary Cooper had a contract where he didn't have to speak for the first seven days.

...