David McCallum got his first Equity card back in 1946 and 75 years later he is still in demand in Hollywood at the age of 87. McCallum, who has family links to Macduff, will return as Dr David ‘Ducky’ Mallard for season 19 of the global smash hit NCIS, which will premiere on September 20.
He joined the cast in season one, just like his co-star Mark Harmon, and has a stated net worth of $10 million. He is paid $75,000 per episode. Few of the original cast members of NCIS are still present as of right now, and McCallum has been working on a restricted schedule since his contract was renewed in 2017. McCallum, who resides in New York, seemed content with the arrangement, which allows him to spend more time with his family while keeping the character on the show.
It’s hard to imagine he had a hard time at first settling in America back in the 1960s.
“We all go through terrible periods of anxiety and so on,” he said.
“You suffer them but once you’ve been through them, you can learn a certain degree of tolerance towards yourself.
“This allows you to be tolerant towards other people.
“The whole idea of Man being born equal is a ludicrous idea.
“We’re not! Some of us are much more fortunate than others.”
Musical background
McCallum was born in 1933, in Kelvinside, Glasgow, where his father was leader of the Scottish Orchestra and his mum was a cellist.
“Both Sir Thomas Beecham and Sir Henry Wood wanted father for the London Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, respectively,” he said.
“I heard later that, at the time, a cartoon appeared in a Glasgow paper, showing father in his kilt, holding his violin case, with Beecham and Henry Wood fencing with their batons above his head.
“The caption was: ‘If music be the food of love, what ails these knights?’
“Beecham won and father came down as leader of the London Philharmonic.”
In 1936, the family moved down to Hampstead Garden Suburb until war began in 1939.
“We were evacuated with gas masks over our shoulders,” he said.
McCallum relocated to Scotland to be with his mother, where he attended school close to Loch Lomond. The violin was McCallum’s first musical instrument when he was in school. He later switched to the cello before picking up the oboe. He received instruction from renowned oboe player in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Leonard Brain, and after practicing for a while, he joined the Royal Academy of Music’s Junior Orchestra. But he abandoned his musical studies when he developed a strong addiction to the theater.
“From the age of 12, or even earlier, I worked with BBC Radio, with all those wonderful actors like Laidman Browne in the BBC Rep,” he said.
“I had an Equity card at 12 and after a spell at University College School, Hampstead, I went on the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.”
The 1950s were spent hopping from one stage management post to another, with repertory companies in Leatherhead, Pitlochry and Chesterfield. In 1961, after a year at Glyndebourne, a spell at the Oxford Playhouse and other work here and on the continent, McCallum went to America to play Judas Iscariot in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
McCallum garnered two Emmy Award nominations for his performance as Illya Kuryakin in the television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Working together with renowned producers David Axelrod and H.B. Barnum, McCallum produced four albums for Capitol Records in the 1960s that contained uniquely individualized renditions of well-known songs by performers like The Beatles and Petula Clark.
The list of stars with whom David McCallum has worked with during his career includes Hollywood screen icons such as John Wayne and Steve McQueen. McCallum never quite repeated the popular success he gained as Kuryakin and his additional television credits include Colditz, Sapphire and Steel, and The Invisible Man.
His feature film credits include The Great Escape, Mosquito Squadron, Billy Budd, Freud and A Night To Remember. McCallum and Robert Vaughn would go on to reprise their iconic roles of Kuryakin and Solo in a 1983 TV film, Return Of The Man From U.N.C.L.E..
Family links to Macduff
In 1985 he enjoyed a family holiday in the Bridge of Allan when the McCallum clan attended his uncle John Abercrombie’s 50th wedding anniversary.
“That was a good excuse for the entire clan to get together in Bridge of Allan,” he said.
“It really was a marvellous holiday.”
The trip brought back memories of damming burns with his brother.
“My uncle John, an architect, showed us how to take turf and stones and build dams and we used to go out and dam the streams to form swimming pools,” he said.
“Then we’d have picnics of stovies cooked on a wooden fire.
“When the pool was full we’d swim in it.
“At the end of the day, we’d let this great tidal wave go on down – much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the local farmers!”
They also traveled up to Aberdeen and around to Macduff, where his aunt Kitty then resided, during that trip back in 1985. They visited every location where Macbeth lived before returning to Glasgow by way of the lochs and the Western Isles. In The Say U.N.C.L.E. Affair, a 1986 episode of The A-Team, McCallum and Vaughn were reunited once more.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. remains one of the highlights of his life.
At the height of the programme’s success, his fame was astronomical. He was rescued from Central Park by mounted police on one occasion when he found himself enjoying a taste of Beatlemania-style adulation.
When he was in Louisiana, the governor invited him to dinner.
But their visit was interrupted when some girls were found trying to break into the mansion! McCallum joined NCIS and discovered a new fan base in the United States that is every bit as devoted as his army of acolytes from the 1960s.
He said: “You never know how these things will work out or what is around the corner.
“But NCIS has been a phenomenon, if has attracted huge audiences all over the world and I’m now hearing from people who have watched me in programmes from the ’60s and ’70s after first noticing me in NCIS.”
Following his success in NCIS, McCallum planned a “roots trip” for his American children and grandkids to visit Scotland, but his Aunt Kitty passed away just as the flights were being booked. McCallum has taken his NCIS responsibilities so seriously that before joining the series as a consultant, he specialized in pathology. Dr. James Palmer, his former assistant, took over as Chief Medical Examiner of NCIS after his character, Ducky, retired in March 2019. Despite very occasionally appearing, he nonetheless plays a crucial role in the show.