Though Robert Vaughn was the initial star of the NBC espionage romp “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which ran from 1964 into the dawn of 1968, leaving the world 105 episodes of varying seriousness and weirdness, David McCallum, who died Monday at the age of 90, played the spy I loved more.
It had something to do with my temperamental preference for sidekicks over alpha dogs, who, unencumbered by the weight of conventional heroism, were freer, funnier, more eccentric characters — actual characters. With his blond Beatle bob and iconic turtlenecks, McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin, a Russian working in the flush of the Cold War for an internationalist agency for good, seemed more of the moment, and indeterminately younger than Vaughn’s Americanized Bond, Napoleon Solo — though the actors were only a year apart and in their early 30s when the series began.
Where Solo embodied the twilight of a style, more Rat Pack than Fab Four, Illya intimated something fresh — he might have carried off a Nehru jacket, or beads — even if the series itself, like most things older generations create for younger, was something less than authentically hip. (Which is not to deny its cultural potency.) That McCallum was British — born in Scotland, raised in London — hit just the right note in the morning of Swinging London and the pop-musical, pop-cultural British Invasion. (Illya’s Russianness was laid lightly over his fundamental Britishness, and McCallum de-emphasized the accent as the series went on.)
Illya was soft-spoken, unflappable, ascetic, mysterious. “We’re never going to be specific about this character,” was his conception, as he later told an interviewer from the Television Academy Foundation. “He’s going to be an enigma all the way.” (Sharp-eyed viewers wondered about the wedding ring the character wore, which was only McCallum’s own, kept on at the request of his first wife, the actor Jill Ireland.) That McCallum recalled himself as “a young boy who was very much a loner, very much a reader of books,” feels right in tune with his screen presence.