David McCallum travels through his 70-year career
THE INSIDE WORD
Scottish actor David McCallum has played time travellers and PoWs, and worked for UNCLE and NCIS... “I have so many memories, so many people and places,” he tells RT from his home in New York.
Early film roles included Hell Drivers and A Night to Remember in the late 1950s, while TV hired him for two roles in US anthology series The Outer Limits in the 60s. “It was shot on location at MGM, but the studio work was all done in a tiny studio right off Sunset Boulevard,” McCallum recalls.
He played Hobart, an inventor who toys with time — “It was an interesting idea” — but in his first episode, in 1963, he was Gwyllm, a miner who becomes a guinea pig in an experiment to speed up human evolution. The part required increasing amounts of make-up… “I would get there around four in the morning and Fred Phillips, the make-up man, and I would work until 8 o’clock putting on all that prosthetic.”
As the script was running short, McCallum made a suggestion in a scene where the enhanced Gwyllm is flipping through books and one of them contains sheet music. He then proceeds to play complex Bach pieces.
In fact, McCallum might have had a career in music. “My father and mother were both musicians. I became an oboe player and my father offered to send me to the Paris Conservatoire to study the oboe. By that time I was hooked on the stage and said, ‘No, I’m going to go on the boards.’ And I did.”
1963 ended up being a busy year, with the release of the classic war film The Great Escape, in which McCallum played “dispersal” expert Eric Ashley-Pitt. Any outstanding memories?
“Yes, the Odeon Leicester Square, the front rows of the upper circle all reserved for cast and crew.
We sat there, that enormous red curtain parted, with Elmer Bernstein’s music. It’s a moment I can remember as if it was ten minutes ago. Extraordinary.”
McCallum couldn’t quite escape PoW camps — he went back inside for the BBC series Colditz (which began 50 years ago). “He was a very interesting guy, the man that I played [RAF officer Simon Carter, based on real Colditz inmate Flight Lieutenant Dominic Bruce]. Pat Reid wrote the book on which the series was based — it’s all gung-ho and hail-fellow-well-met.”
By this time McCallum was already a huge star, thanks to secret service series The Man from UNCLE (1964—8), playing Illya Kuryakin, a Russian agent to Robert Vaughn’s American Napoleon Solo. So what quantities of fan mail are we talking? “Oh, huge sacks of it. We couldn’t possibly deal with it ourselves. Back then there was a whole department.” Illya and Napoleon were very different characters who blended well. Was that the case off screen with Robert Vaughn? “We worked together and that was it. I think I went out to dinner with Robert once. He invited me because he was a health food nut and used to go to a very early health food restaurant and I was dreadfully sick the next day. I thought, ‘Health food is not for me. I’m going to eat my bacon and eggs!’ ”
Another great TV pairing was with Joanna Lumley — “Jo’s a good friend” — in Sapphire and Steel (1979—82), ITV’s supernatural series that many enjoyed without fully understanding. Was that the same for McCallum? “It was in the beginning, but then I talked to Peter [Hammond] who was writing it and Shaun [O’Riordan] who directed it and I said, ‘My mother’s cleaning lady, Mrs Puttock, used to say she loved watching Sapphire and Steel but she didn’t understand a word of it. And I said the scripts from now on have to be made Puttock-proof.”
But perhaps his most successful series is the one he’s been in for 20 years: NCIS. “I have two shows left on this contract. I’ll be going out to shoot it, health permitting, if and when they need me.” Now 89, he and his wife, model and actor turned interior designer Katherine, are still working — “Retirement is a work in progress, shall we say!” MARK BRAXTON
For a longer version of this interview, visit
UNITED FORCE