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David McCallum, the suave Scottish actor who transformed from a sidekick into a sex symbol as Illya Kuryakin, the international secret agent who helped save the world each week on the 1960s spy spoof “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” and who found renewed stardom nearly four decades later as the chief medical examiner on “NCIS,” one of television’s longest-running shows, died Sept. 25 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 90.
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His death was announced in a statement by CBS, the home to “NCIS” for 20 seasons. The network did not give a cause.
From 1964 to 1968, millions of Americans tuned in to watch Mr. McCallum and co-star Robert Vaughn on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” a James Bond parody — launched with a little help from 007’s creator, Ian Fleming — about a pair of spies working for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, a clandestine agency headquartered behind the dressing room of a nondescript New York tailor shop.
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The show was built around Vaughn’s debonair American agent, Napoleon Solo, with Mr. McCallum’s character initially envisioned as little more than a cerebral second banana from the Soviet Union.
Setting aside Cold War rivalries, the spies team up to fight an evil organization known as T.H.R.U.S.H. (the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity), which threatens to turn dogs against their masters, bring the dead back to life and unleash a toxic gas that causes a lethal case of the hiccups.
Mr. McCallum recalled that for the show’s first episode, his character was given little more than four lines and a Russian accent. But with his blond-haired, blue-eyed good looks and mod wardrobe of black turtlenecks, Mr. McCallum became a teen idol, and Kuryakin emerged as a fan favorite, inspiring a 1966 pop song, “Love Ya Illya,” by British singer Alma Cogan.
Mr. McCallum met President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House, sailed with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on Nantucket Sound and was mobbed by fans everywhere from Baton Rouge (where he said he was forced to take shelter in a women’s bathroom) to Manhattan, where he was rescued from stampeding autograph-seekers by mounted police officers in Central Park.
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“Why must they express their adoration for Illya through the most determined efforts to dismember me?” he asked the New York Times in 1965, noting that “an astonishing number of Illya addicts would like nothing better than an opportunity to hug me to death.”
Critics were initially mixed on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” — “You couldn’t tell whether they were playing it for satire or for real,” Variety complained — but Mr. McCallum received two Emmy nominations for the role and reprised the part in eight spinoff films. (He said he wasn’t asked to participate in a 2015 movie revival, which starred Armie Hammer as Kuryakin and Henry Cavill as Solo.)
The part also bolstered Mr. McCallum’s film career, although there was a disconnect at times between his heartthrob persona and the more complex roles he pursued on-screen: Even when he played a distraught Judas Iscariot in “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), he was treated like a rock star, with 500 young fans cheering his entrance at a movie theater in Springfield, Ill., according to an account in TV Guide.
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Mr. McCallum, who acted onstage in addition to appearing in more than 130 movies and television shows, joked that he was shadowed by Kuryakin, like a spy who can’t quite shed an enemy agent. But he began to gain a bit of distance after he was cast as Donald “Ducky” Mallard, the avuncular bowtie-wearing medical examiner on “NCIS,” which premiered in 2003.
To lend a heightened realism to his performance, Mr. McCallum said he studied pathology, acquiring “about six feet of books on death,” and frequented the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office, watching autopsies firsthand. His character became a stalwart of the series, offering psychological profiles of suspects and conducting autopsies on victims, often while talking to the deceased. “Their bodies tell me a great deal,” he explains. “It helps to reciprocate.”
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For all the show’s success, many older viewers still knew him from his breakout role. Even some of the show’s characters, such as special agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon), seemed aware of the resemblance. Asked in one episode what Ducky looked like “when he was younger,” Gibbs replies: “Illya Kuryakin.”
The younger of two sons, David Keith McCallum Jr. was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on Sept. 19, 1933. His mother, Dorothy Dorman, was a concert cellist. His father and namesake was the principal violinist for groups including the Scottish Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; to rock fans, he was better known for persuading Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page to use a violin bow on his guitar.
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Early on, there was little question that Mr. McCallum would go into the family business. His father persuaded him to study the oboe, deciding that the instrument offered the best chance at a successful performing career. Mr. McCallum soon concluded that he was out of his depth and turned toward theater, getting a backstage job as an electrician’s assistant at 14.
“I discovered the stage, and how easy it is to get on a stage and learn words and bat your eyelids and look vulnerable. And people applauded. I got bitten very, very early,” he told the Sunday Times of London. Still, he “wasn’t terribly castable in those days,” he added, recalling an adolescence in which he was “sort of cave-chested, small, thin.”
Mr. McCallum studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and was drafted into the British army, serving a stint in West Africa. He returned to London to perform in live television plays — he did “52 roles a year,” by his count — and act in B movies, including the 1957 crime drama “Hell Drivers.” The cast included another young Scottish actor, Sean Connery, as well as actress Jill Ireland, whom he soon married.
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Over the next few years, Mr. McCallum appeared in movies including the Titanic drama “A Night to Remember” (1958), “Billy Budd” (1962) and “Freud” (1962), his first Hollywood film. He was also featured in the blockbuster World War II movie “The Great Escape” (1963), as an imprisoned British officer who comes up with a way for his tunnel-digging comrades to get rid of excavated dirt.
The film led to a friendship with co-star Charles Bronson, who introduced Mr. McCallum to Hollywood producers including Norman Felton, leading to his role in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” It also helped precipitate the end of his marriage: His wife went on to marry Bronson, whom she met on the set, while Mr. McCallum married Katherine Carpenter, a model turned interior designer, in 1967.
In addition to his wife, survivors include two sons from his first marriage, Paul and Val McCallum; two children from his second, Peter and Sophie McCallum; and eight grandchildren. A son from his first marriage, Jason McCallum, died in 1989 of an accidental drug overdose.
“The pain is very real, but it’s like an ache that turns into anger,” Mr. McCallum told the Belfast Telegraph in 2016. “At the same time, there’s a frustration that you couldn’t really have done anything about it, which makes it even worse.”
For a few years in the 1960s, Mr. McCallum returned to music, releasing instrumental jazz pop albums that included his song “The Edge,” which was later sampled in Dr. Dre’s hit single “The Next Episode.” He later did voice work for audiobooks, a side project that inspired him to write a book of his own, the 2016 crime novel “Once a Crooked Man.”
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But he remained best known for his television work, with credits that included the 1969 TV movie “Teacher, Teacher,” which earned him a third Emmy nomination, and the 1970s British TV series “Colditz,” about a prisoner-of-war camp, and “Sapphire & Steel,” in which he and Joanna Lumley played inter-dimensional operatives battling supernatural forces.
Mr. McCallum also acted on Broadway, notably playing Emperor Joseph II in a 1999 revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus.” The previous year, he drew raves for his off-Broadway performance as a security guard in Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy “Communicating Doors.” At least one audience member arrived on opening night with an Illya Kuryakin T-shirt.
“I had never seen ['The Man From U.N.C.L.E.'],” his co-star Mary-Louise Parker told the New York Times, “so I wasn’t prepared for the phenomenon. He’s this quiet, thoughtful, sweet man with this perfect air of refinement. But when he comes onstage, the ladies in the front row literally start to swoon.”
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