David McCallum

David McCallum had two careers roughly forty years apart, and both made him a household face. The first was Illya Kuryakin, the Russian agent in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from 1964 to 1968, a supporting part the audience promoted to co lead. It brought two Primetime Emmy nominations and a Golden Globe nomination, and it turned a quiet Scot into the reason a great many people watched.

Before that he was a busy young British film actor: Ashley-Pitt in The Great Escape, the wireless operator Harold Bride in A Night to Remember, Steven Wyatt in Billy Budd, a brother in Hell Drivers. After U.N.C.L.E. came the eccentric middle stretch his fans treasure most, above all Sapphire & Steel, where he played Steel as something not quite human, and the 1975 Invisible Man series as Dr. Daniel Westin. He returned to Kuryakin in a 1983 television film.

The second career began in 2003, when NCIS cast him as Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, a medical examiner built out of digression and courtesy. He played the part for two decades, longer than any other job in his life, and turned a role that exists to deliver exposition into the show's conscience. He worked in animation too, voicing Alfred Pennyworth across several DC features and Professor Paradox in Ben 10, and he was a musician as well as an actor. He died in 2023.