Kelly’s Heroes, filmed in Yugoslavia in 1969, had a famously shambolic filming. There were a lot of good stories to come out of it. Like this,
“ It wasn’t all laughs during the shoot in Yugoslavia however. Sutherland almost died after contracting meningitis on set and going into a coma. “I got sick in the middle of shooting Kelly’s Heroes… I was out for six weeks,” he would say. “They took me to hospital – I had spinal meningitis. They didn’t have the antibiotics, so I went into a coma, and they tell me that for a few seconds, I died. I saw the blue tunnel, and I started going down it. I saw the white light. I dug my feet in.”
There were further complications when, back in Los Angeles, Sutherland’s wife Shirley Douglas was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to possess unregistered explosives in relation to her support for the Black Panthers.
As she was led away, her lawyers wondered how they would contact her husband, who was off working in the Balkans. A message was eventually relayed to a colleague. He agreed to pass on details of Douglas’s detention.
“Clint Eastwood came walking out of the sun like it was a spaghetti western and said, ‘I have some bad news for you. Your wife’s been arrested,’” Donald Sutherland would later remember.
“For buying hand grenades. From an undercover agent of the FBI. With a personal cheque,” he recalled Eastwood saying. “And when he got to the personal cheque he started laughing so hard he fell to the ground. I had to help him back up.”
Gutted by this. He was truly one of the greats. May flights of angels sing him to his rest, etc 😭
Kelly’s Heroes, filmed in Yugoslavia in 1969, had a famously shambolic filming. There were a lot of good stories to come out of it. Like this,
“ It wasn’t all laughs during the shoot in Yugoslavia however. Sutherland almost died after contracting meningitis on set and going into a coma. “I got sick in the middle of shooting Kelly’s Heroes… I was out for six weeks,” he would say. “They took me to hospital – I had spinal meningitis. They didn’t have the antibiotics, so I went into a coma, and they tell me that for a few seconds, I died. I saw the blue tunnel, and I started going down it. I saw the white light. I dug my feet in.”
There were further complications when, back in Los Angeles, Sutherland’s wife Shirley Douglas was arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy to possess unregistered explosives in relation to her support for the Black Panthers.
As she was led away, her lawyers wondered how they would contact her husband, who was off working in the Balkans. A message was eventually relayed to a colleague. He agreed to pass on details of Douglas’s detention.
“Clint Eastwood came walking out of the sun like it was a spaghetti western and said, ‘I have some bad news for you. Your wife’s been arrested,’” Donald Sutherland would later remember.
“For buying hand grenades. From an undercover agent of the FBI. With a personal cheque,” he recalled Eastwood saying. “And when he got to the personal cheque he started laughing so hard he fell to the ground. I had to help him back up.”