David McCallum, star of hit TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and NCIS, dies at 90

[dutchman]

Scottish-born McCallum has been remembered as a gifted actor and author whose 'legacy will forever live on'



Actor David McCallum, who became a teen heartthrob in the hit series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in the 1960s and was the eccentric medical examiner in the popular “NCIS” 40 years later, has died at the age of 90.

McCallum died on Monday of natural causes while surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital, CBS said in a statement.

“David was a gifted actor and author, and beloved by many around the world. He led an incredible life, and his legacy will forever live on through his family and the countless hours on film and television that will never go away,” CBS said.

Scottish-born McCallum had been doing well appearing in films like A Night to Remember (about the Titanic), The Great Escape and The Greatest Story Ever Told (as Judas). But it was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. that made the actor with the Beatlesque haircut a household name in the mid-‘60s.

The success of the James Bond books and films had set off a chain reaction, with secret agents proliferating on both large and small screens. Indeed, Bond creator Ian Fleming contributed some ideas as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was being developed, according to Jon Heitland’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Book.

The show, which debuted in 1964, starred Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, an agent in a secretive, high-tech squad of crime fighters whose initials stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Despite the Cold War, the agency had an international staff, with McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, Solo’s Russian sidekick.

The role was relatively small at first, McCallum recalled, adding in a 1998 interview that “I’d never heard of the word ‘sidekick’ before.”

The success of the James Bond books and films had set off a chain reaction, with secret agents proliferating on both large and small screens. Indeed, Bond creator Ian Fleming contributed some ideas as The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was being developed, according to Jon Heitland’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Book.

The show, which debuted in 1964, starred Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo, an agent in a secretive, high-tech squad of crime fighters whose initials stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Despite the Cold War, the agency had an international staff, with McCallum as Illya Kuryakin, Solo’s Russian sidekick.

The role was relatively small at first, McCallum recalled, adding in a 1998 interview that “I’d never heard of the word ‘sidekick’ before.”

McCallum’s work with U.N.C.L.E. brought him two Emmy nominations, and he got a third as an educator struggling with alcoholism in a 1969 Hallmark Hall of Fame drama called Teacher, Teacher.

In 1975, he had the title role in a short-lived science fiction series, The Invisible Man, and from 1979 to 1982 he played Steel in a British science fiction series, Sapphire and Steel. Over the years, he also appeared in guest shots in many TV shows, including Murder, She Wrote and Sex and the City.

David Keith McCallum was born in Glasgow in 1933. His parents were musicians - his father, also named David, played violin and his mother played cello. When David was three, the family moved to London, where David Sr. played with the London Philharmonic and Royal Philharmonic.

Young David attended the Royal Academy of Music where he learned the oboe. He decided he wasn’t good enough, so he turned to theatre, studying briefly at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But “I was a small, emaciated blond with a caved chest, so there weren’t an awful lot of parts for me,” he commented in a Los Angeles Times interview in 2009.

After time out for military service, he returned to London and began getting work on live television and movies. In 1957 he appeared in Robbery Under Arms, an adventure set in early Australia, with a rising actress, Jill Ireland. The couple married that same year.

McCallum had three sons from his first marriage, Paul, Jason and Valentine, and a son and daughter from his second, Peter and Sophie. Jason died of an overdose.

[rebbonk]

I wasn't aware that he was an author.

R.I.P.