In the 1960s, there was one actor who could justifiably claim that ladies prefer blonds. As the secret agent Illya Kuryakin in the TV series The Man from UNCLE, David McCallum, who has died aged 90, received more fan mail from young women than any other actor in MGM’s history.
With his Beatles-style haircut, his liking for black turtleneck sweaters (which created a fad among viewers nationwide), and an aloof and enigmatic air, through which he sneaked a fair amount of charm and self-amusement, McCallum made Kuryakin into a sex symbol of the period. He provided a trendy contrast to Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo, his fellow spy, who went in for expensive suits and ties.
Although Solo and Kuryakin worked perfectly in tandem, their personalities were at variance, the former being urbane, easygoing and sociable, the latter more reserved, intellectual and intense.
The James Bond film craze had already taken off when The Man from UNCLE series was launched in 1964, so US audiences were used to laidback heroes and their villainous nemeses. However, it was surprising to find a hip Russian alongside the good guys of United Network Command for Law and Enforcement fighting against the evil organisation THRUSH (an acronym for Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity), during the cold war.
McCallum, who played Illya with the slightest Russian accent and an occasional Scottish lilt, was also known recently for his long-running role from 2003 in the popular CBS crime series NCIS.
He was born in Glasgow. His parents were classical musicians; his mother, Dorothy Dorman, a cellist, his father, David McCallum, a violinist and leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. McCallum Jr won a scholarship to University College school in Hampstead, north London, before being accepted at Rada, where he studied from 1949 to 1951, having given up his ambition, and his parents’ wish, to play the oboe professionally.
In 1951, McCallum managed to satisfy his love for both music and the theatre by landing the position of assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne opera. However, he was called up to do his national service in West Africa. Demobbed as a lieutenant, the 19-year-old McCallum headed for the theatre, which mainly meant stage-management jobs in rep.In 1956, he half-heartedly posted off some photographs of himself to the Rank Organisation, which was scouting for young talent. The photos were seen by Clive Donner, who was casting his first feature, The Secret Place (1957), and he invited McCallum to do a reading.
“Although he was nervous, his voice was firm, and he was very good,” Donner recalled. “I sat and looked at him for a long time. He was very skinny, with a marvellous head and huge eyes. I think he was living in a bedsit in Archway at that time and had little money. We put him under contract straight away.”
Obviously under the influence of James Dean, the leather-jacketed McCallum, playing a young punk involved in a heist, does his best to express teenage angst. In Cy Endfield’s gritty thriller Hell Drivers (1957), McCallum plays Stanley Baker’s brother, on crutches as a result of a crime. In the cast, as a waitress, was 20-year-old Jill Ireland. McCallum and Ireland were to marry a few months before the film’s release. Soon after, they played young lovers in Robbery Under Arms (1957), an adventure shot mostly in Australia. At that time, the couple were often pictured together in fan magazines.
It was back to British realism with Basil Dearden’s Violent Playground (1958), in which McCallum plays a juvenile delinquent gang-leader. Despite a mite too posh an accent, he makes a vivid impression with his drawn features and mop of fair hair.
There followed several more conventional supporting roles, such as radio operators, first on the Titanic in A Night to Remember (1958), and a jumpy one in an Elstree-studio Burmese jungle in the second world war drama The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961). He was even more nervy in John Huston’s Freud (1962) as one of the first of the psychoanalyst’s patients, a young man who assaulted his father because of an incestuous love for his mother.
After appearing as a sympathetic officer in Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd (1962), McCallum went to Germany to make John Sturges’s The Great Escape (1963), the most expensive PoW picture of them all. Among a starry cast, headed by Steve McQueen, James Garner and Charles Bronson, McCallum held his own among the Brits as Eric Ashley-Pitt – “Dispersal – who devises a way of getting rid of dirt from the digging of an escape tunnel. But more significant for him was the fact that Ireland, who was with him during the shoot, fell for Bronson. Ireland and McCallum divorced; he later married Katherine Carpenter, while Ireland married Bronson.
McCallum, who was already making his principal career on television, was given the secondary role of Kuryakin in The Man from UNCLE, but was soon granted equal billing with Vaughn after it rapidly became clear that he had a huge fanbase. Alma Cogan recorded a song called Love Ya, Illya, which became a pirate-radio hit in Britain in 1966, and as late as 1991, an Argentinian funk duo named themselves Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas, after McCallum’s character and the Colombian football player Carlos Valderrama.
The first feature-film spin-off from the TV series, To Trap a Spy (1965), in which McCallum had a minor role, did little business. But the second one, The Spy With My Face, co-starring McCallum, really lifted off, followed by the box-office hits One of Our Spies Is Missing, One Spy Too Many and The Spy in the Green Hat (all 1966), and How to Steal the World (1968).
After The Man from UNCLE finished in 1968, McCallum continued to make guest appearances on TV until his second long-running series, the BBC’s Colditz (1972-74), in which he played Flt Lt Simon Carter, a hot-headed RAF officer who is impatient to escape.
Subsequently, McCallum appeared and disappeared as a scientist in The Invisible Man (1975-76), a US TV production, and co-starred with Joanna Lumley in ATV’s spooky sci-fi series Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) as the eponymous extra-dimensional detectives sent to Earth to monitor threats to the time-stream.
McCallum was seldom off television screens over the next three decades, making the occasional sortie into films. He also did some theatre in New York, where he and his wife had settled, notably Julius Caesar in a Central Park production (2000), playing the title role as “a senile old man, suffering from ideas of grandeur” according to the actor; and portraying the Emperor Joseph II on Broadway in Peter Hall’s revival of Amadeus (1999-2000).
In 2003, his looks belying his age, McCallum began playing Dr Donald “Ducky” Mallard, chief medical examiner, in the TV series NCIS, following the cases of the fictional agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. His research for the part included studying pathology and sitting in on autopsies. He stayed with the show for the rest of his life, appearing in all 20 seasons up until this year. In one episode, a character asks another what Ducky looked like when he was younger. “Illya Kuryakin” comes the reply.
McCallum is survived by Katherine, their son, Peter, and daughter, Sophie, and by his sons Val and Paul from his first marriage; Jason, his third son with Ireland, died in 1989.
• David Keith McCallum, actor; born 19 September 1933; died 25 September 2023
• Ronald Bergan died in 2020
