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RIP David McCallum — 20 Comments

  1. His most recent screen credit was this year. It’s quite something to arrive at age 90 with enough wits and enough vigor to be on a set year round.

  2. Married 56 years if I read correctly. Above all his screen credits, that stands out. May light perpetual shine on him.

  3. “The Great Escape” was a favorite of a whole generation. It was on TV a lot when i was growing up.
    ______

    Vaughn and McCallum were a good duo. One reason why the movie remake failed was that the two actors they cast (Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer) were too much alike. Neither had very much individuality.

  4. I recall the scene. Ashley-Pitt sees that the gestapo agent recognizes Big X and grapples with him, ultimately killing him, so that Big X can escape. The Great Escape was on TCM yesterday. I think it was scheduled, as opposed to being a tribute to McCallum.

  5. Looked him the other day. Married twice. First wife was Jill Ireland, who was in that first episode. As noted above, he was with his 2nd wife for 56 years. H3 was, essentially, musical royalty, with his father playing first violin in the London Philharmonic, and his mother playing cello. He played oboe, and was following in their footsteps – then took a sharp turn into acting.

    He was easily the most beloved character on NCIS, where, as with Man From UNCLE, he turned a minor role into being a costar.

  6. Jill Ireland was subsequently married to Charles Bronson – who was also in The Great Escape (and appears in the clip).

  7. Bruce, I might mention that during “The Great Escape” his fellow actor, Charles Bronson, “took” Jill away from him. Bronson and Ireland were married for many years until she died of cancer

  8. I first saw him in a film in 1962 when he was in the Peter Ustinov directed and acted film “Billy Budd”.

  9. The Great Escape was thrilling for boys my age, It was a “Boy’s Life” type of movie, The POW camp was more like a boy’s summer camp filled with mischievous happy-go-lucky lads, and bumbling Nazis as bumbling counselors. It featured the four coolest male actors of the era; maybe, I daresay, of all time. Namely: Steve McQueen (still the coolest ever IMO); James Coburn; Charles Bronson; and James Garner. Wow! McQueen, Coburn, and Bronson were also in the Magnificent 7 together, and they were very cool in that movies as well. They struck young lads like me (I was 13 when it came out) as real manly men, the sort of men every red-blooded American boy should want to emulate, want to become. Brave, funny, irreverent, honest, decent, roguish, competent, loyal — you all know what I mean. Each one a real mensch. The best role models a 13-year-old boy could have.

    P.S. McCallum was pretty cool too.

  10. “The Great Escape” was a favorite of a whole generation. It was on TV a lot when i was growing up.

    Abraxas:

    According to my Irish friends, “The Great Escape” is a traditional family movie on Christmas Day in the UK and Ireland. Not the only one, of course, but up there.

    This surprised me. TGE is a great movie, but it does not leap to my mind as a likely Christmas tradition.

  11. McCallum introduced his wife, Jill Ireland, to Bronson during the filming. I don’t know whether the following story is apocryphal or not, but here it is:

    Bronson was married to English actress Jill Ireland from October 5, 1968, until her death in 1990. He had met her in 1962, when she was married to Scottish actor David McCallum. At the time, Bronson (who shared the screen with McCallum in The Great Escape) reportedly told him, “I’m going to marry your wife”.

  12. I remember seeng The Great Escape with my father and uncle when it came out. They got a big kick out of the scene where the prisoners made booze and got really drunk. It was a case of art imitating life.

    After the Lodz Ghetto was liquidated, they were shipped to a labor camp, Konig Wusterhausen, outside Berlin. One day the SS marched in and told prisoners that the Allies had bombed a freight train and one of the box cars had all the ingredients for making vodka. They were rounded up to bring back the stuff and make the alcohol which they proceeded to do with the results you can imagine. Unlike the movie, no one escaped.

  13. My wife had a thing for McCallum then, too. Oddly enough, I had a major crush on the star of a different spy show. Mrs Peel.

    BTW, Leo G Carroll, IIRC, acted in more Hitchcock movies than anyone else, unless you count Hitchcock himself.

  14. There was an episode of NCIS where someone wondered what Ducky looked like when he was young and Gibbs responded, “He looked like Ilya Kuryakin.”

    I loved that line.

  15. I almost got shot, because of David McCallum. One night, during a drug enforcement training session at the local technical college, the instructors from the Wisconsin Department of Justice asked us say who we were, and which police department or Sheriff’s Office we were with.

    I told them I was with U.N.C.L.E., and reported to Director Kuryakin. The lead instructor looked at me, and told me that if I said one word into my pen, he would shoot me where I sat.

  16. I was rather amused to discover that Donald Pleasance, who played the chief forger in “The Great Escape” had actually been RAF aircrew in WWII, and after his aircraft was shot down over Germany, he did rack up some time as a prisoner of war. There was a certain cadre of actors who had served in the military … later played a part in a movie that they had done in earnest during the war. Anthony Quayle was another – he was an SOE operative in occupied Yugoslavia. It must have been a rather schizophrenic experience, acting in “The Guns of Navarone” a few years later.

  17. The Password is Courage is a film that predates TGE and which TGE closely resembles. It starred Dirk Bogarde, another of those actors who had served, reaching the rank of major and being awarded seven medals

  18. On a related note, a bunch of the actors in “Hogan’s Heroes” were Jewish Holocaust survivors or refugees. Robert Clary (Louis) survived a camp but lost most of his 13 siblings. John Banner (Schultz) emigrated before the war but lost family members. The actor who played General Burkhalter lost his parents. Werner Klemperer was the son of conductor Otto Klemperer who had emigrated in the 30s to Los Angeles.

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