Scottish-born actor David McCallum seems to have been on the big
and small screens forever. His career spans nearly 60 years and he
is still going strong as the popular medical examiner Donald “Ducky” Mallard in
the hit US crime series NCIS. Along the way, he has appeared in The
Great Escape, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Colditz and Sapphire & Steel,
amongst many other films and TV shows. This year he celebrates his 83rd birthday, a prompt to look back at his amazing career.
David Keith McCallum was born in Glasgow on 19 September
1933. His parents were Dorothy Dorman, a cellist and David McCallum
Sr, a violinist, eventual leader of the Scottish Orchestra and later the London
Philharmonic. The McCallums lived by the Botanic Gardens, close to
David’s grandfather’s house in nearby Clouston Street. In 1936, the
family moved to Hampstead as a result of David’s father’s work. But
almost a year into the Second World War, young David was evacuated back to Scotland
to stay with his Aunt Margaret. He lived for a time at Gartocharn,
West Dunbartonshire, near Loch Lomond.
As he grew older, David was encouraged to take up music and
became an oboe player, but he did not have any serious ambitions to follow his
parents into a professional music career. However, after significant
acting success in the 1960s, David McCallum did record several instrumental
albums, as arranger and conductor, including A Part Of Me, A Bit More Of Me and
Music – It’s Happening Now. Some of the material on these albums was
collected onto a cash-in album called Open Channel D, referring to the The Man
From U.N.C.L.E. radio intro. His father was a featured player on
several tracks.
After a couple of performances on stage as a child, David liked
the sound of audience applause and appreciation and began considering acting as
an enjoyable way to earn a living. He studied at the Royal Academy
of Dramatic Art and learned about stage management and production as well as
acting. Like many young actors at the time, he served his
apprenticeship in repertory companies across the UK, doing bit parts on radio
and not earning much money. But, the handsome McCallum was soon
spotted and, in 1957, he joined the Rank Organisation and immediately found
himself in minor roles on the big screen. In those early years, he
appeared in Ill Met By Moonlight, Hell Drivers, Robbery Under Arms and A Night
To Remember.
Around
this time, he met and married Jill Ireland, herself a young actress in the
early stages of a film career. They worked together occasionally but
divorced ten years later. They had three sons. Ireland
later married Charles Bronson but died, sadly, of breast cancer at 54 in
1990. Not long after the divorce, McCallum married his current wife,
Katherine.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, David McCallum worked in
television dramas and feature films, gaining experience and becoming reasonably
well known in the process. He played Private Whittaker in The Long
And The Short And The Tall, Steven Wyatt in Billy Budd and, a role fondly
remembered by his fans forever, Ashley-Pitt (in charge of dispersal) in The
Great Escape. The latter film, oft-repeated on television, is a
prime example of the starry era that David McCallum lived
through. The cast list is extraordinary – Steve McQueen, James
Garner, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Gordon Jackson,
John Leyton and so many more great supporting names. McCallum (as
Ashley-Pitt) had a dramatic death scene filmed at Fussen railway station in
Ostallgau, Bavaria. The Germans shot his character as he diverted
attention away from some of his fellow escapees. The Great Escape
was an important career film to most of the aforementioned names and a key
point in David McCallum’s professional life.
He
was cast as Judas Iscariot in The Greatest Story Ever Told during Hollywood’s
fixation period with epic movies as all of the studios tried desperately and
expensively to find that successful Ben Hur ingredient from some years
earlier. In the Last Supper scene, Max Von Sydow as Christ is
powerful but McCallum, sitting with the other eleven Apostles, at the end of
the table hesitates when handed the chalice, not speaking but looking intense
and remorseful as the betrayer. If anyone assumes that David McCallum
is an actor only in light roles, I urge them to watch this film.
But, it was a jokey, fun, almost cartoonish TV show that
launched David McCallum into orbit as a major screen star. The Man
From U.N.C.L.E. ran for 105 episodes from 1964 to 1968. Robert
Vaughn was the handsome American hero Napoleon Solo and McCallum was his
heartthrob Russian sidekick Ilya Kuryakin. Both characters worked
for the United Network Command For Law Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.) battling the
evil enemy THRUSH (later defined clumsily in books as Technological Hierarchy
for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation
of Humanity).
The show was a global hit and both Vaughn and McCallum featured
prominently in all the showbusiness magazines of the day. The Man
From U.N.C.L.E. run included several feature films that were basically TV
episodes stitched together for cinema release. The two stars enjoyed
their moments in those crazy years of fan adoration that almost equalled the
squeals and screams of Beatlemania wherever they went. Some of the ensuing
years must have felt like a return to Earth as Robert Vaughn and David McCallum
took on a variety of roles and guest starring parts in television and film.
David McCallum returned to a hit TV series when he starred
alongside Robert Wagner and Jack Hedley in Colditz in he early 1970s, followed
by The Invisible Man and then Kidnapped, playing Alan Breck
Stewart. He appeared alongside Joanna Lumley in the quirky Sapphire
& Steel before embarking on more guest starring roles in Hart To Hart, The
A-Team, Matlock and Murder, She Wrote.
In
2003, he joined the cast of a new US crime show called NCIS (Naval Criminal
Investigative Service) alongside Mark Harmon as boss Leroy Jethro Gibbs and a
terrific core cast. He played the Edinburgh-born and educated Donald
“Ducky” Mallard, a medical examiner, slightly oddball and eccentric but also
sympathetic and sincere. In over 200 episodes, he became a huge star
all over again. It has been quite a remarkable career in such a
fickle industry.
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