By Peter Cooney
WASHINGTON – David McCallum, who became one of TV’s biggest stars of the 1960s playing Russian spy Illya Kuryakin on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and then won over a new generation of fans on the popular “NCIS” series decades later, has died at 90, NCIS said on Monday.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of David McCallum and privileged that CBS was his home for so many years. David was a gifted actor and author, and beloved by many around the world,’ NCIS said on social media.
Variety reported that he died of natural causes.
The Scottish-born son of two musicians had an acting career spanning seven decades that dated back to his student days in the 1950s at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where one of his classmates was future star Joan Collins.
He launched his career with supporting parts in a number of British films, including “A Night to Remember” in 1958, where he played Harold Bride, radio operator on the doomed Titanic. He gained the attention of American audiences with his small but pivotal role as one of the prisoners of war plotting a mass breakout from a German prison camp in the 1963 World War Two classic “The Great Escape.”
The film featured a star-studded international cast including Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and James Garner. During filming, McCallum introduced his wife, Jill Ireland, to co-star Charles Bronson, whom she married after leaving McCallum.
McCallum also guest-starred in a number of American TV shows including “The Outer Limits” and the legal drama “Perry Mason,” where he did a comic turn as a hapless, unlucky-in-love Frenchman. In 1964, he appeared in the pilot of a spy series starring American actor Robert Vaughn as “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” McCallum’s part, in which he spoke only a few lines, was to prove his launchpad to international fame.
