Actor Kiefer Sutherland announced his mother’s death on Twitter, saying she succumbed to complications surrounding pneumonia on Sunday morning. Sutherland said his mother’s illness was not related to COVID-19.
Shirley Douglas, the impassioned Canadian activist and veteran actress who was mother to actor Kiefer Sutherland and daughter of medicare founder Tommy Douglas, has died.
She had just turned 86 on April 2.
Sutherland announced his mother’s death on Twitter, saying she succumbed to complications surrounding pneumonia on Sunday morning. He said that her illness was not related to COVID-19.
“My mother was an extraordinary woman who led an extraordinary life,” said Sutherland.
“Sadly she had been battling for her health for quite some time and we, as a family, knew this day was coming.”
A native of Weyburn, Sask., Douglas worked with famed directors including Stanley Kubrick on Lolita and David Cronenberg on Dead Ringers. She won a Gemini Award for her performance in the 1999 TV film, Shadow Lake.
She also tirelessly supported a variety of causes throughout her life, including the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers and the fight to save public health care, pioneered by her politician father.
In 1965, Douglas married Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, with whom she had two children before they divorced — twins Rachel, a production manager, and Kiefer, who became a film and TV star in his own right.
Douglas also had another son, Thomas, from a previous marriage.
Loved both arts and politics
In a 2009 interview with The Canadian Press, she admitted that being away from home for lengthy periods of time to pursue acting was hard on her children, but said she knew it would make her a better mother in the end.
“Our jobs, we move around a great deal … and that is the reality that my children grew up with — is being left, and not happily,” said Douglas, who used a wheelchair in recent years due to a degenerative spine condition that caused her severe pain.
“You either have to decide you’re going to be guilty about it and not do it, or that you are going to do it and that you will be, in the end — and I h