Take One - Part 7
Revisiting an original draft.
Great Lives
#406
David McCallum
September 19, 1933 - September 25, 2023
“I lost my wife to Charles Bronson.”
It might sound like a tabloid headline but this is precisely what happened to David McCallum in the late summer of 1982. To make matters worse, the Glaswegian actor was very good friends with his love rival and Great Escape co-star Charles Bronson. A public cuckolding of this order might’ve destroyed some men. McCallum’s reaction to his split from fellow actor Jill Ireland was, like so many things in the man’s life, rather surprising.
“It’s just what happened,” he matter-of-factly explained in 2013. “It was an extremely difficult time, not least because Jill and I had three children. But I never hated Charlie. He was always a good friend.”
As for the rumour Bronson told McCallum “I’m going to marry your wife” after first laying eyes on Ireland during a visit to the Bavarian set, that too is given short shrift by the actor.
“I have no recognition of that,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Look, I could sit here and talk to you about my life and 99.9% would be wonderful and positive.” Indeed, McCallum’s truly was a life very well lived. An author, a musician, a Man From UNCLE, a Great Escaper, Steel to Joana Lumley’s Sapphire, Judas to Max von Sydow’s Christ - David McCallum thrived when his romantic misfortune could have crushed him.
Some might attribute this stoicism to a tough Scottish upbringing. The McCallums, however, weren’t you’re stereotypical Glaswegians. Classically trained musicians, David Snr was so highly regarded that he moved the family south of the border where he took up the position of first violin with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Naturally, David’s parents hoped he too would embrace the art form. Gifted as he was on the oboe and the upright bass, McCallum had caught the acting bug. A regular on the radio by 1946, he later made his way to RADA where he had the romantic good sense to date fellow student Joan Collins.
From there until that fateful/possibly apocryphal day on the set of The Great Escape, David’s life was the most brilliant blur. His big movie break came playing Stanley Baker’s disabled brother in Hell Drivers (1957), Cy Enfield’s outlaw truckers actioner. It was also during the shoot that he met and fell in love with Jill Ireland. That they were married within the year made David’s next big roll - as a troubled teen in Basil Dearden’s Violent Playground (1958) - a bit of a stretch, but the good notices and exciting offers continued to roll in.
Peter Ustinov’s Billy Budd, John Huston’s Freud - both served as mile markers on the road to Stalag Luft III and his eye-catching, trouser-shaking turn as Lieutenant-Commander Eric Ashley-Pitt (’Dispersal’). Had you told anyone at the time that three years would elapse before the dashing blond starred in a feature film, you’d have been thought daft.
If the fallout from the Bronson-Ireland affair robbed McCallum of motivation and momentum, so it rather improbably opened the door to an even more successful phase of his career. As the actor recalls, “I had no work and bills to pay so Charlie suggested we go and have lunch in the MGM commissary. This was something of a childhood dream, what with there being a different star sat at every table. But while I was star-gazing, Charlie was talking to Norman Felton and Sam Rolfe. Sam had made Have Gun - Will Travel and Norman created Dr Kildare. Now they were trying to get this James Bond-style action drama off the ground. Charlie suggested I might be right for one of the supporting roles, the guys agreed and the rest is.... well, you know what.”
At the height of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’s popularity, David McCallum received more fan mail than any other actor in MGM history - no mean feat given that Elvis Presley was also under contract to the studio. More amazing still was the fact that, at a time when the Cold War more closely resembled an ice age, David became world famous playing a Soviet secret agent, the charismatic enigmatic that is Illya Kuryakin. Not only that but during a photo shoot with U.N.C.L.E co-star Robert Vaughn, McCallum met the model Katherine Carpenter with whom he’d spend the rest of his life.
If his U.N.C.L.E. success was at least in part down to his love rival Bronson, there was another far sadder reason David McCallum was able to put that betrayal behind him. As he’d explain “The worst moment of my life was when I lost my son Jason [to an accidental overdose] in 1989 - there’s no question of that.” If he never fully came to terms with the tragedy, McCallum didn’t let Jason’s death derail him a second time. After all there was simply too much to do.
David McCallum’s list of accomplishments runs to a crime novel, Once A Crooked Man, no end of acclaimed stage and voiceover work, plus four instrumental LPs, the second of which - 1967’s Music: A Bit More Of Me features ‘The Edge’ extracts from which will be familiar to fans of Dr Dre, Grand Theft Auto IV and/or Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver.
“The best moment of my life is right now.” It’s a lovely sentiment and it’s certainly must have felt that way throughout McCallum’s 23 years playing Donald ‘Ducky’ Mallard on NCIS. Sure the show was never critically acclaimed but that didn’t bother a man who never succumbed to snobbery, taking to the boards when others would’ve preferred him to take up an instrument; finding career salvation on the small-screen when walking away from film appeared a death sentence.
When David McCallum’s long, happy life finally came to an end on September 23rd 2023, he was surrounded by family, friends and colleagues - at least two if not three of those mantles being applicable to some of those present. Sixty years earlier, he walked away from Jill Ireland with “nothing more than a case of 1959 Chambertin Burgundy wine and a tube of toothpaste.” One trusts there was plenty of champagne drunk in those final days as this lovely man looked back on his remarkable time with us.