R.I.P. David McCallum, NCIS and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. actor
Known to millions as NCIS’ Chief Medical Examiner Ducky, McCallum was 90
Aux News David McCallum
David McCallum, the prolific TV mainstay best known for roles on NCIS and an Emmy-nominated turn on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., has died. NCIS’ social media accounts announced the actor’s death Monday. He was 90.
“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,” the post reads. “He led an incredible life, and his legacy will forever live on through his family and the countless hours on film and television that will never go away. We will miss his warmth and endearing sense of humor that lit up any room or soundstage he stepped onto, as well as the brilliant stories he often shared from a life well-lived. Our hearts go out to his wife Katherine and his entire family, and all those who knew and loved David.”
McCallum is best remembered for his remarkable television career. After spending the 50s and early 60s in movies, including a role in the Steve McQueen hit The Great Escape, McCallum jumped to the small screen, doing guest spots on The Outer Limits and Perry Mason.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was his breakout. With his mop of blond hair and slight frame, McCallum played Illya Kuryakin opposite Robert Vaugh’s Napoleon Solo. The series followed a pair of counterespionage secret agents as they engaged in spy games marked by inventive gadgets and 60s cool. The show earned McCallum two Emmy nominations and rode the initial wave of James Bond mania to 105 episodes, several spin-off movies, and a 2015 movie starring Henry Cavill.
With the final The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie in 1968, McCallum returned to the United Kingdom, where he became a fixture of British television on such programs as Colditz and Sapphire & Steel. He also found work in the U.S. as a guest star on Murder, She Wrote and seaQuest DSV.
McCallum found his next iconic role at CBS as a regular on NCIS. The fan-favorite chief medical examiner, Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, appeared on the show for the rest of the actor’s life. In 2021, NCIS star Mark Harmon left the series, making McCallum the only remaining original cast member.
Born September 19, 1933, in Maryhill, Glasgow, McCallum was born into a family of musicians. His father and mother, a violinist and a cellist, respectively, moved the family to London so his father could lead the London Philharmonic. However, during World War II, McCallum was evacuated from the city and returned to Scotland.
Described by his son as a “true renaissance man,” McCallum had talent far past his television roles. He also released his first novel, Once A Crooked Man, in 2016, and narrated more than 30 audiobooks. In the 60s, he recorded four albums for Capitol Records as a composer and conductor. His most famous composition, “The Edge,” received a second life as the keystone sample on Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode.”
McCallum was married twice, with the first going about as poorly as a marriage could. After 10 years of matrimony with his Hell Drivers co-star Jill Ireland, she left McCallum for Charles Bronson, whom Ireland met through her ex-husband on the set of Great Escape. McCallum rebounded well enough, marrying Katherine Carpenter in 1967. The couple remained together throughout the rest of his life.
McCallum is survived by Katherine, his sons Paul, Val, Peter, his daughter Sophie, and his six grandchildren.
77 Comments
Sapphire and Steel is beyond weird. Do check it out.
100%
It’s like the X-Files, played through Nigel Tufnell’s amp, but with the FX budget of Pertwee-era Doctor Who. Also, terrifying.
And Tufnell’s amp was, as usual, dialed to 11.
Until McCallum coolly pointed out they could just make 10 louder.
Extreemely valid point. We must, however. remember that while David McCallum was both cool and smart, poor Nigel was just cool.
okay, sold!
Damn. He’ll never see NCIS: Sydney.
To be fair, I’m from Sydney and I never will either.
Which gigachurch do you go to? And come – what if they have Cold Chisel song as theme track and a cameo from Lisa McCune?She’d have made admiral by now, surely. Hal McElroy-Donald Bellisario is a match that has to happen.
I’m Buddhist. I stopped watching Blue Heelers after Peter Mochrie’s character arc was over too.
Coolest spies ever on TV ….Open channel D.
I like the symmetry of Vaughn ending up on a British show in his golden years, and McCallum ending up on an American one.
Illya Kuryakin was far smarter and cooler than Napoleon Solo. Reading McCallum’s obit, the actor was very cool and smart in his own right.He’ll be missed by generations.
He was one of those guys who you thought would be around, acting, forever.R.I.P. Ducky
He also did a guest episode in the first season of Babylon 5.
And was responsible for one of the most iconic samples ever…
He was an intelligent and very solid actor who should have gone on to bigger roles had he not been catapulted into sex symbol fame in the early sixties (he was INSANELY popular for a few years). Still, he seemed to harbor no regrets and was happy to just make a comfortable living acting.If you want to catch him in his prime check out his two “Outer Limits” episodes and by all means the first season of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” which is ridiculously smart, well-crafted and fun popcorn TV.
My youngest daughter fell in love with Ducky on NCIS when she was in her early teens. She was stunned when she watched an U.N.C.L.E. episode one afternoon after school and saw him as a young man. Kids always think their elders were always old. She could have totally been one of McCallum’s groupies had she been around in the ‘60s.It’s easy to discount how popular he was in the ‘60s unless you’re of a certain age, but it’s no understatement to say he was a male sex symbol on par with Tom Jones and Leonard Nimoy for a good chunk of the decade.
Dude studied forensic pathology so Bellisario seriously considered making him a technical adviser.
In the UK they had tribute to him on the BBC Breakfast News this morning and they showed a clip of him at Heathrow Airport in the 60s and it’s not an exaggeration to say that the reception from the young ladies was Beatles-esque.
If you want to catch him in his prime check out his two “Outer Limits” episodesActually three, he also did the 90’s reboot, and on a remade 60s episode, “Feasibility Study” to boot:
The guy so hot that Sally Draper couldn’t help masturbating to him right next to her sleeping friend.
With the final The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie in 1968,????????Need to do better research
Wish they did more .
Its amazing how he does not age .
I’m sure he was having a good time with the role, but once you got past the obvious “why is there a goth chick in the goddamned Navy” question, there was always the “why is a darling old Britisher who looks like he got sprung from a P.G. Wodehouse novel the M.E. on an American armed-forces cop show?” issueI swear, NCIS was the worst thing you ever sat your grandparents down in front of.
He was just like Union Jack Jackson, fighting in the US Marines.
Ducky was obviously fleeing the murder rate in his native land. If television is to be believed, Britain’s dwindling population consists largely of murderers and detectives. You can even extrapolate to the heat-death of these whodunnits. Someday there will be only three people left alive in the British Isles. When inevitably one of them kills one of the others, since you already know which one is the detective, there won’t be any mystery in it.
Yes, it’s so full of murderers here in the U.K. I’m thinking of moving to America. I hear a place called Cabot Cove is nice.
Considering how many coroners and CSI technicians there are in the UK, according to British television, it might be that Ducky couldn’t get a job back home and had to emigrate to keep his poor mother fed.
I was in the Navy for 20 years. The life of a real-life NCIS agent, especially at sea, is far more sedate than what we’ve been seeing on CBS over the years. They do have challenging jobs at times, but the vast majority of what they do on a daily basis is pretty mundane.
I can believe that, but NCIS had the same issue that “Murder, She Wrote” did, where a cute little town had a murder rate higher than crack-era Detroit. With that many people dying in the Navy every single week, who needed to go to war to put their lives at risk?
I did the math once, and I can’t remember exactly but using a conservative estimate of the murder cases all the teams deal with, you would be 4-6 times more likely to be murdered just by joining the Navy. Also the amount of agents and stuff that are killed is almost equal to to the total number of Federal law enforcement that isn’t the FBI.
Even better was when they’d bust into a room and yell “NCIS!!” yet no one was like “…who??? Is that supposed to mean something?”
I think they started using “Federal Agent!” about halfway through the series because the producers finally figured out that nobody was buying it.
That’s pretty funny (and I’ll have to take your word for it). Because I bet even fans of the show can’t tell you what NCIS stands for.
NCIS? Isn’t that that tournament for those second-rate college basketball teams that can’t make the NCAA’s big show?
I thought it was the former Division II NCAA football conference?
I think it’s that new program where college players can make money off their name and image.
You’re thinking of the NIT (Not Invited Tournament)
“National Crop Insurance Services? The tornado took out my carrots! My claim was legit!”
So true. Procedurals and murder mysteries all suffer from that syndrome. My personal favorites these days are Midsomer Murders (roughly 140 murders over 23 seasons) and Death in Paradise (roughly 100 murders over 12 seasons). Midsomer is a fictional rural county that—if it were a real place—has an unusually horrific murder rate when compared to the population. I would have moved to someplace safer, like the absolute WORST neighborhood in London, 20 years ago.The tiny Caribbean island of Saint Marie has an even smaller population, yet still has at least a murder a week. They also tend to import both murderers and victims—about half overall are tourists. The economy is inexplicably unaffected by the large number of bodies collecting in the morgue and convicted murderers crowding the jails.
The goth chick was not in the Navy. NCIS is part of the Department of the Navy, but its agents and civilian employees are not military personnel. Same goes for Dr. Mallard.
Okay, perhaps, but I have real problems believing that she could have waltzed around the place looking like she was all ready to shake her spooky thang to Bauhaus and not raised eyebrows. Even if they’re not personnel, these are all military-adjacent people.
Now that is a possibility. And to be clear, they are Navy personnel, I was just drawing the distinction between sailors and regular Feds because “in the Navy” implies the former.I don’t have any direct experience with the various DoD law enforcement arms, but I know that civilian Feds and contractors on military bases tend to be pretty buttoned up. But there’s also a lot of supervisor (direct and up-the-chain) discretion there, so while it’s beyond what you’re likely to see in an actual NCIS office, it’s not impossible.Someone like Dr. Mallard being there, though, wouldn’t be out of the ordinary at all.
Thank you for your input. That’s a part of the world I don’t know anything about. To me, “In the Navy” implies a disco song, honestly.I will say that Ducky often seemed like he’d dropped in from another show entirely. You had the tough Israeli chick, the goth chick, the Very Good Looking Young Lawyer and…somebody right out of a BBC miniseries? Did they cast that show at random?
I always thought being “In the Navy” was a big party.
Have you seen the Sean Connery film The Presidio (1988) in which Connery, accent and all, plays a US army Lt. Colonel? (Yes, I know he also played a Soviet sub captain in the better known The Hunt for Red October, but there at least you can argue that he wasn’t “really” speaking in his Scottish accent but rather in Russian, just like the people in HBO’s Chernobyl were).
His character was an immigrant from Scotland.
Yes, to give the movie credit, it try to justify his accent. Which is more than most movies featuring Connery which just rolled with it.
In all fairness, I actually encountered more than a few sailors of British origin (English, Scottish and Welsh) serving in the U.S. Navy over the course of my career. It wasn’t commonplace, but it wasn’t exactly a rare thing either. TBH, it’s probably more likely to find the old Scot working for the Navy than the young Goth chick. We’re talking slim but not impossible odds.
NCIS is the slipperiest show I’ve ever tried to watch. I’ve seen at least one hundred episodes of the various incarnations and I could not tell you the plot of any single episode. Even if I’m watching it’s background noise.
I’m sure he was having a good time with the role, but once you got past the obvious “why is there a goth chick in the goddamned Navy” question, there was always the “why is a darling old Britisher who looks like he got sprung from a P.G. Wodehouse novel the M.E. on an American armed-forces cop show?” issueHe could always be a dual-citizen/dual-national or acquired citizenship later on in life after an upbringing in the UK. Not that it particularly matters, but those are rather simple explanations.
NCIS employees are civilians, not part of the Navy. In the show and real life.
(NCIS is a civilian agency)
There was a woman who opened her house For Weird Homes of Austin tour. Had a bunch autopsy tools and whatnot in it. She had black dyed hair and claimed she was the inspiration for the character. I think she said she was an employee of the city of Los Angeles. No, that’s not meant to be a solution your hypothetical question.
I just hope he was able to enjoy the money he made doing that dreck.
Yeah, but now I’m craving Eggs Woodhouse at 2 a.m.Thanks man.
Let’s not forget the Invisible Man. A mainstay of my childhood’s Saturday mornings. And a pretty decent version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.
Came to mention Invisible Man as well, for the exact same childhood reason.
“Robert Vaugh’s Napoleon Solo”
The Man from T.Y.P.O.
I enjoyed him as Ducky but one factual correction. He and Sean “”McGee” Murray are the two “originals” left. McCallum left the show, pretty much five years, at least, ago. He had a small number of appearances per season. Murray joined in the second season and is the longest running cast member of the show. RIP, Mr McCallum. NCIS will not be the same without your interesting, fun, and annoying stories.
None of the obituaries are mentioning one of his first film roles – Violent Playground. Imagine if Blackboard Jungle had been set in pre-Beatles Liverpool and had starred James Dean.
I enjoyed the moment in NCIS where somebody asked Gibbs what Ducky looked like when he was younger, and Gibbs replies “Ilya Kuryakin”. A subtle nod to the fact that McCallum was a much bigger sex symbol than Harmon ever was.
This
With his two marriages as attestation. Dude pulled down a couple of lookers.
Seriously, even in his dotage the man just oozed charisma.
Dammit, YouTube.
Spent many hours watching Man From Uncle with Dad.And Outer Limits! The one where he gets evolved into a version future man is awesome.
From reading this obituary, it’s clear that it didn’t take much acting on his part for the role of Dr. Mallard. He sounds just like the character—kind and gentle and extraordinarily intelligent. Indeed, a “true Renaissance man.” I’m a little sad about this. It sounds like 90 years of life well-lived. Good-bye, Ducky.
When I was a kid I loved seeing him as The Invisible Man.
This is sad, but … hell of a run. I loved Man from UNCLE and he was a big part of that. He didn’t have anything to do with the creation of the thing, but in the height of the Cold War, a tv show that put a Russian and an American spy together was pretty innovative. I watched a few episodes awhile back, and it holds up better than I’d expected. I hope some library somewhere has the DVDs, and that Interlibrary Loan will be my friend.In Return of the Man from UNCLE, there was a chase happening and Solo and Kuryakin needed help. Which they got – a timely assist from a fellow spy in a fast car. Their “old friend James…” Played by George Lazenby.Someone on here mentioned Sapphire and Steel. Low-budget, weird, scary and cool as hell. I had the DVD set a few years back – I think it’s still readily available for about 30 bucks. And it’s streaming free on Tubi and some other sites. Worth checking out.I never saw one second of NCIS but it’s nice that he had a steady gig to have fun with. Seems like had a good life. Married to the same woman since 1967, had some kids and grandkids.. And was a damn good actor no matter the role. Yes, even that bit part in Night of the Lepus.
As originally conceived (by Ian Fleming, no less), UNCLE was supposed to be the law enforcement branch for the United Nations, which would have made Ilya’s inclusion seem less random. But the UN didn’t want to be associated with the project, so the “N” was changed to “network”. Which made UNCLE sound like an ad hoc agency that reported to no one.
I guess intellectually I knew he had to be that old, but man he wore it well. Did NOT look like a 90 year-old.
I’ve been a McCallum superfan since discovering the Man from UNCLE in the 80s (my handle across several platforms is from the show).
I’m salty that UNCLE didn’t get to be iconic as Star Trek. Everybody should check out “Sapphire and Steel” he and AbFab’s Joanna Lumley investigate time-related shenanigans. Low budget but creepy as hell. Motherlove is another good thing he was in. Diana Rigg plays his extremely estranged and bitter ex-wife.
Nice job for the most part. Was a bit bemused, though, by your referral of “The Great Escape”— one of the largest and greatest ensembles of absolutely top-tier male actors in one tremendously powerful film— as the “Steve McQueen hit” ??
Oh no.Please watch Sapphire and Steel. The weirdest kind of Doctor who like children horror out there.