DAVID McCALLUM
(19 September 1933 - 25 September 2023)
Older audiences may recall the Scottish actor David McCallum, who has died aged 90, from The Man from U.N.C.L.E., while younger viewers may know him for NCIS. He was also a talented musician, with four albums for Capitol Records, while Dr Dre sampled a track for the Grand Theft Auto IV video game and the 2017 film Baby Driver.
David Keith McCallum was born in Glasgow to the violinist David McCallum Sr and his cellist wife Dorothy. When David Sr became Leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the family moved to London where David Jr attended University College School to study the oboe. However, in his teens he joined the BBC Drama Repertory Company and began appearing in amateur productions. At 18 he was conscripted into the Army, after which he attended Rada.
His first job was as assistant stage manager at Glyndebourne in 1951, then he did repertory work and minor film parts. The Rank director Clive Donner cast him in A Secret Place (1957), his film about a diamond robbery. He was also in Herbert Wilcox’s These Dangerous Years and Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers. Robbery Under Arms was made in Australia where he met his future wife, Jill Ireland. He played a thug in Violent Playground, and carved out a good career in films and TV. After A Night to Remember, about the Titanic, John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion and Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd, came The Great Escape and The Greatest Story Ever Told (he was Judas in the latter).
McCallum did much TV work in the 1960s, and from 1964 he was in over 100 episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as the Russian agent Illya Kuryakin, who seemed more popular than the show’s star Robert Vaughn. Maybe it was his dourness or the blonde hair or just public appeal for McCallum that made him so popular. Alma Cogan released a record about Illya (under the nom de plume Angela and the Fans), Victoria Wood put him in her song ‘Fourteen Again’ (“I was a crazy girl, I had to laugh/I had Illya Kuryakin’s autograph”) and an Argentinian duo named themselves Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas. He also had a fan club. There was a TV movie in 1983, and features – To Trap a Spy, The Spy With My Face, The Spy in the Green Hat – all cobbled from TV episodes. Other TV work included Colditz, Kidnapped and Sapphire and Steel. From 2003 to 2023 he was the medical examiner Dr Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard in NCIS.
David McCallum married the actress Jill Ireland in 1957 but they divorced in 1967 after having three sons. He then wed the fashion model Katherine Carpenter and they were together for 58 years. Jill Ireland later married Charles Bronson in 1968.
MICHAEL DARVELL