Another one gone
VIEWPOINT
By RALPH HARDIN
Evening Times Editor
I saw on the news feed that actor Donald Sutherland passed away on Thursday. Not a tragedy. He was a month shy of his 89th birthday and was still working right up until his death, so he definitely had a full and fruitful life (he’s even got one final film role, in a movie called “Heartland” that will be released later this year).
He wasn’t necessarily anyone’s favorite actor. I enjoyed him as the original Capt. Hawkeye Pierce in the M*A*S*H movie and he had a great role in the great Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but his son Keifer was more in my generation’s wheelhouse (you might remember him as the cool vampire in The Lost Boys or as Jack Bauer in the TVshow 24. But the older Sutherland was pretty cool too, and younger readers might best know him as the evil President Snow in the Hunger Games movies.
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But really, what Sutherland’s passing does is remind me once again that every entertainer who ever made me laugh or listen, every actor, musician, writer or comedian I grew up on or even enjoy now is going to eventually die. It’s not morbid. It’s just a fact of life.
I was very sad when Richard Pryor and Robin Williams died. Those are probably the two celebrity deaths that I hated to hear the most. And I know there are more on the horizon. Writer Stephen King and actor Steve Martin and actor Alan Alda (the TV version of Capt. Hawkeye Pierce on M*A*S*H) aren’t going to live forever. I was especially bummed out when Matthew Perry died unexpectedly at just 54 years old, the same year I turned 50. His character Chandler on the TV series Friends probably had a bigger impact on how I use sarcasm and how I deliver my speech than I’d like to admit.
Did you know there’s something called a “dead pool,” in which people speculate on which celebrities will die within a certain time frame?
It’s usually within a calendar year or something. OK, that is a bit morbid, but it’s also cool when guys like Robert Downey Jr. or Demi Lovato or Drew Barrymore get their lives together and make it back from the brink. I hear Eminem is clean after years of drug abuse. That’s pretty cool, so that’s pretty cool.
