Donald Sutherland was part of one of Hollywood’s most notorious controversies

nypost.com:

Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday at age 88, included one of the most controversial sex sequences in Hollywood history. The nookie was so realistically shot, many audience members at the time believed it was genuine.

Some still do.“We did a good job, it’s very real,” cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond said in production notes for a re-release. “People still say they actually made love, but they didn’t.”In the screen adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novella, directed by Nicolas Roeg, Sutherland and Christie play a married couple, John and Laura, who go to Venice after the death of their young daughter.

When a psychic claims to have an otherworldly connection to the deceased girl, Laura’s mood improves and the pair’s passions are enflamed for the first time in ages.Clothes come off, they inelegantly tumble all over the bed and there are even a few seconds of (simulated) oral sex that was extremely rare for a mainstream movie in the 1970s.In his review for The Post, critic Archer Winston wrote, “I don’t know exactly what it accomplishes, except that no one can call such fancy angles and brilliant cutting mere pornography.”Peter Bart, who was a Paramount executive at the time, claimed to have been on set that day and watched the action unfold. “It was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were f—ing on camera,” wrote Bart in his 2011 book “Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex).” But Sutherland denied the scandalous claim to the Hollywood Reporter. “Not true.

None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it,” he said.Later, while promoting the film “The Leisure Seeker,” Sutherland said in a video that the entire process had been clinical. “We were just alone in the room with Nic and Tony.