Scotsman Obituaries: David McCallum, Glasgow-born actor who found international fame in The Man from UNCLE

David McCallum at an event in Beverly Hills in 210 (Picture: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

David McCallum, actor. Born: 19 September 1933 in Glasgow. Died: 25 September 2023 in New York City, aged 90

At the peak of his popularity in the 1960s David McCallum received the sort of adulation more usually associated with Beatlemania. The Glasgow-born actor had already appeared in about a dozen films in Europe when he took the role of the enigmatic Russian secret agent Illya Kuryakin, working for international peace, in The Man from UNCLE, a blatant attempt by American TV to cash in on the popularity of James Bond.

He received 30,000 fan letters a month, appeared on posters and bubble-gum cards and was mobbed when he appeared in public. When he went for a walk in New York’s Central Park he had to be rescued by police. He even released a few pop records of his own. “There was a form of insanity about it all... it was scary and it was enjoyable,” he said in an interview in 1998.

The Man from UNCLE ran for more than 100 episodes between 1964 and 1968. Wearing black polo-neck sweaters and sporting his blond hair in a Beatle cut, Illya Kuryakin was mysterious and occasionally acerbic, with more than a hint of angst about him, for which he drew on his Presbyterian upbringing. “We Scots, we tend to be awfully tight inside,” he told one interviewer. He was the epitome of cool and the series was so popular that episodes were re-edited and released as cinema films.

McCallum as Illya Kuryakin in The Man from UNCLE (Picture: Harry Benson/Express/Getty Images)

McCallum went on to star in a number of other TV series on both sides of the Atlantic, notably Colditz in the 1970s, in which he was a prisoner of war; Sapphire and Steel in the early 1980s, in which he and Joanna Lumley were time-travelling troubleshooters; and US crime drama series NCIS, playing a medical examiner. That constituted a mini-career in itself – he appeared in 20 seasons of NCIS, beginning in 2003.

David Keith McCallum was born in Glasgow in 1933. His father, also named David McCallum, was leader of the Scottish Orchestra and subsequently the London Philharmonic, his mother Dorothy Dorman was a cellist. McCallum won a scholarship to University College School in Hampstead in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music before abandoning the idea of becoming a professional oboe player and enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Since his early teens he had taken juvenile roles on radio, although he seemed happier painting props than acting. His earliest jobs were in stage management, at repertory theatres at Pitlochry in Perthshire and with various companies in England. A talent for accents, however, brought him work as an actor, initially on children’s television.

Director Clive Donner saw a photograph of McCallum, styled to look like James Dean, and hired him as Belinda Lee’s leather-jacketed, angst-ridden kid brother in the 1957 crime drama The Secret Place.

Rank put him under contract and cast him in a series of similar roles. He met and married English actress Jill Ireland on the Australian adventure film Robbery Under Arms, played Stanley Baker’s brother in Hell Drivers alongside the young Sean Connery, and was a young thug who terrorises a class of schoolchildren with a shotgun in Violent Playground.

Having made his mark in the industry as a conscientious, serious and shy young actor, he went on to play supporting roles in some of the most important British films of the period. Credits include the Titanic drama A Night to Remember, The Long and the Short and the Tall and Billy Budd. He also appeared in John Huston’s ill-fated biopic Freud, with Montgomery Clift, a similarly introspective, serious Method actor, with whom he established a rare rapport.

The Great Escape gave McCallum probably his most important film role yet, as Lt Cmdr Eric “Dispersal” Ashley-Pitt, in a glittering international cast that included Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Richard Attenborough and Charles Bronson. On the back of The Great Escape he headed for Hollywood and the role of Judas Iscariot in The Greatest Story Ever Told.

However, there was a lengthy delay between his work on the Biblical epic and its eventual appearance in cinemas in 1965. He had a wife and three children to support and, although he was now a minor star in Britain, he remained virtually unknown in Hollywood. He took jobs in television instead, appearing in two episodes of the original version of The Outer Limits. He also appeared in an episode of the 1990s revival.

A year after working alongside John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told, he was reduced to accepting an offer of a supporting role in the pilot episode of a James Bond take-off called The Man from UNCLE. The star was Robert Vaughn, who played a suave agent called Napoleon Solo, working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Initially Kuryakin was very much a supporting character, but he proved so popular, particularly with teenage girls, that he was soon elevated to co-lead.

The Man from UNCLE was neither a serious espionage drama nor an out-and-out spoof. It fell somewhere in between, and even managed to tap into the developing hippy spirit of universal peace and love. At a time when the world was still in the grip of the Cold War it presented a message of international co-operation, with US and Russian agents working together, under benign Englishman Mr Waverly (Leo G Carroll).

Each week they foiled some devilish scheme hatched by the international criminal organisation THRUSH, in a series of “affairs” that included The Deadly Decoy Affair, The Girls of Navarone Affair and The Deadly Smorgasborg Affair. When Vaughn and McCallum were reunited for a one-off special in 1983 it was subtitled The Fifteen Years Later Affair.

Jill Ireland left McCallum for his Great Escape co-star Charles Bronson and in 1967 he wed interior designer Katherine Carpenter, with whom he had two more children.

He starred in the war movie Mosquito Squadron, but despite the phenomenal success of The Man from UNCLE, McCallum never really revived his film career and concentrated largely on television. As well as Colditz and Sapphire and Steel, he starred in The Invisible Man, Kidnapped, Trainer and Cluedo, as Professor Plum.

Later films include The Watcher in the Woods, Hear My Song and Michael Winner’s Dirty Weekend.

NCIS provided his biggest success on American television since The Man from UNCLE. His character Dr Donald “Ducky” Mallard would chat to corpses he examined and developed a devoted following. In one episode someone remarks that in his younger days Ducky must have looked like Illya Kuryakin.

He is survived by his second wife and two children from each of his marriages. One son from his first marriage died of a drugs overdose in 1989.

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