How Man From U.N.C.L.E star David McCallum’s world fell apart when another very famous actor stole his WIFE
ON the set of 1963 war film The Great Escape tough-guy actor Charles Bronson looked David McCallum in the eye and told him: “Pay more attention to your wife. Or I will take her from you.”
At the time, David — who died on Monday aged 90 after a stellar film and TV career — was married to actress Jill Ireland.
She had travelled to the set in Bavaria to watch her husband filming the part of Lt Commander Eric Ashley-Pitt, whose job was to dispose of soil dug from the escape tunnels.
But during breaks in filming, David spent time with his fellow stars, and Jill became close to Bronson, who played Polish tunnel digger Flt Lt Danny Welinski.
David later recalled: “Charlie meant it — and he did take her from me.
“My main memory of The Great Escape is that Jill fell in love with Charlie.”
He and Jill divorced in 1967 and she married Bronson the following year — but the three of them remained friends for the rest of their lives, even sharing childcare duties.
In 1989, when David and Jill’s adopted son Jason died of a drug overdose aged 29, Bronson and David carried his casket.
Six months later, the two men were together at Jill’s funeral after she died of cancer aged 54.
Author Douglas Thompson, who interviewed all three stars, said: “It was a strange ménage — Bronson and David McCallum were still great friends, and Bronson and Jill Ireland were madly in love.
“David was such a decent man that he helped Bronson look after Jill and when Charlie later went off the rails, he was there for him.
“He always said that Charlie did warn him that he would take Jill away.”
David Keith McCallum Jr was born in Maryhill, Glasgow in September 1933.
His father, David Snr, was a violinist and leader of the Scottish Orchestra and his mother, Dorothy, played the cello.
Young David was musical too, learning to play the oboe and gifted enough to conduct an orchestra.
Yet while music played a large part in his life, it was acting that proved a bigger lure for the young David.
After National Service with the Middlesex Regiment in West Africa he enrolled at renowned London drama school Rada, where Joan Collins was in his class.
It was on the set of one of his first films, 1957’s Hell Drivers — a story of truckers starring Sean Connery — that he met his future wife Jill.
She fell instantly for the “blond Scotsman with poet’s eyes” and just seven days later they were married.
It lasted ten years and they had three sons. Later she said: “I kind of got whooshed into getting married.
“I did love David but we were too young. I don’t know how he managed to be married to me for so long.”
After making The Great Escape, David was cast as Judas Iscariot in the 1965 John Wayne film The Greatest Story Ever Told.
When filming ended he and Jill stayed on in Hollywood.
She could be closer to Bronson, while David hoped for his big break in the movies.
When no offers came, Bronson took him to MGM’s studio restaurant to meet TV producer Norman Felton, in the hope of getting him work.
Felton was embarrassed that all he could offer David was a tiny part in a new James Bond-style TV series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and he expected David to turn it down.
Decent man
The show starred Robert Vaughn as American agent Napoleon Solo, of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, or U.N.C.L.E.
Running out of options, David accepted the role — and it went on to change his life for ever.
He was cast as Illya Kuryakin, Solo’s Russian sidekick, who wore black turtleneck sweaters and had a blond haircut in the moptop style of The Beatles.
David recalled: “I had a couple of lines and it was a very minimal character.
“It was the first time I had ever heard the word ‘sidekick’.
“And then I had a terrible allergy from a penicillin shot, and I wasn’t in the second episode.”
But Illya Kuryakin was an instant and massive hit with teenage girls around the world, who mobbed David wherever he went.
He got 30,000 fan letters a month — more than Elvis Presley — but David said: “Illya was never meant to be a teenage sex symbol.”
Even so, within weeks he had become co-star rather than sidekick in the show, which ran for 100 episodes from 1964 to 1967.
Recalling the fans’ mania, David said: “It was wild and at times dangerous.
“On one occasion I was at a graduation ceremony in Louisiana and all hell broke loose.
“All these girls were chasing me and these security guys locked me in a toilet for my own safety.
“In the melee I had chunks of hair pulled out and my clothes were ripped to shreds.”
When Illya had his first TV kiss, 2,000 students at Wellesley Women’s College in Massachusetts threatened to blow up MGM’s TV studios in protest at their hero being given a girlfriend.
Studio bosses made David send a telegram to the college to tell the students the kiss had been part of a plot by THRUSH — U.N.C.L.E.’s enemy organisation.
David said: “In New York I went for a walk in Central Park once. It took two police on horseback to rescue me.
“There was a sort of insanity about it all.”
There was also pandemonium in New York in 1967 when David married his new bride, interior designer Katherine Carpenter.
Extra police were drafted in to keep his fans at bay.
The couple remained married for the rest of David’s life — 56 years — and had children, Peter and Sophie.
Like many actors in the Sixties he released records — though rather than the usual vocal efforts, David recorded four albums of oboe, horn and strings for Capitol Records.
lllya was never meant to be a sex symbol. But it was wild. On one occasion in Louisiana these girls were chasing me and security guys locked me in a toilet for my own safety.
David McCallum
But his biggest musical success came when his instrumental tune The Edge was sampled by Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg for 1999 hip-hop classic The Next Episode.
It was such a success that more than 40 artists have sampled The Edge.
David appeared in many hit TV shows, including wartime prison drama Colditz and fantasy series Sapphire & Steel, where he and Joanna Lumley were time-travelling trouble-shooters.
A Margaret Thatcher fan, David’s favourite quote from the late PM was that “welfare is a wonderful idea until you run out of other people’s money”.
He said: “That really sums up the way I feel.
“When 50 or 60 per cent of the population rely on the Government for food and shelter, the whole structure is so lopsided, it collapses under its own weight.”
In 2003, nearly 40 years after The Man From U.N.C.L.E., David landed the part of pathologist Dr Donald “Ducky” Mallard in US military police drama NCIS.
He appeared in 457 episodes and became the highest-paid pensioner in TV, on £45,000 per show.
To prepare for the role he attended four real autopsies and said: “The very first one I saw close up rather than from behind the glass was that of an elderly gentleman who had been killed by a shotgun.
“I put on gloves and handled the dead body.
“It wasn’t any different from a regular body, except it wasn’t warm.
“You can’t talk about aortic stenosis unless you know what it is and what a failed heart valve looks like.”
In an episode of NCIS, special agent Caitlin Todd asks her boss Jethro Gibbs: “What did Ducky look like when he was younger?”
Gibbs replies: “Illya Kuryakin.”
David once said: “On my gravestone it will say, ‘Here lies David McCallum, also known as Illya Kuryakin, or vice versa’.”
