Robert Vaughn, ‘The Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ Star, Dies at 83

 
Robert Vaughn, who starred as Napoleon Solo on “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” from 1964-68, died
on Friday of acute leukemia, his manager Matthew Sullivan told Variety. He was 83.
The James Bond-influenced “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,” in which Vaughn’s Solo and David McCallum’s Illya Kuryakin battled the evil forces of T.H.R.U.S.H. around the globe (thanks to the glories of stock footage), was quite the pop-culture phenomenon in the mid-1960s, even as the show’s tone wavered from fairly serious to cartoonish and back again over its four seasons.
It spawned a spinoff, “The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.,” starring Stefanie Powers, as well as a few feature adaptations during the run of the TV series, “One Spy Too Many,” “One of Our Spies Is Missing” and “The Karate Killers,” that starred Vaughn and McCallum. Vaughn also guested as Napoleon Solo on sitcom “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” and made an uncredited appearance as Solo in the 1966 Doris Day feature “The Glass Bottomed Boat”; he reprised the role in 1983 for TV movie “The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair.”
A Guy Ritchie-directed feature adaptation of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” was released in August 2015 with Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer starring as Solo and Kuryakin, respectively.
Vaughn vaulted into the public eye with his vaunted performance in the soapy 1959 Paul Newman feature “The Young Philadelphians,” for which Vaughn was deservedly Oscar nominated for best supporting actor.
In the film, Newman’s character is pursuing his Machiavellian way to the top of Philadelphia’s upper crust when he sees his friend, played by Vaughn, manipulated by said upper crust into alcoholism and an unjust murder charge. The New York Times said, “Robert Vaughn, as Newman’s sick and ill-used friend, adds a striking bit in incoherently explaining his dire predicament.”
The next year he was one of the stars of John Sturges’ “The Magnificent Seven,” a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” along with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. The success of the Western certainly boosted the actor’s profile, but his brand of sophisticated urbanite did not mesh well with a career in Westerns. (Though when the enduringly popular film was adapted into a TV series in 1998, Vaughn returned in the recurring role of Judge Oren Travis, and when the material was contemporized and turned into the story of a British soccer team in a 2013 film called “The Magnificent Eleven,” the actor duly starred as the villain, a gangster named American Bob.)
In 1968, after appearing in the movie spinoffs from “The Man From UNCLE,” Vaughn appeared in Steve McQueen vehicle “Bullitt” as the politician who’s out for the head of McQueen’s cop while pressure mounts from other directions as well (and a lot of nifty car chases around San Francisco are offered up).
He did several films in a row at this point: comedy “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969); WWII drama “The Bridge at Remagen,” in which he played the Nazi commander (the New York Times said: “Mr. Vaughn, as the tense commander across the water, is excellent”); a feature adaptation of “Julius Caesar” that starred John Gielgud, Charlton Heston and Jason Robards and in which Vaughn played Servilius Casca; the interesting sci-fi drama “The Mind of Mr. Soames,” in which Terence Stamp played a man, in a coma since birth, who’s brought to consciousness by an American doctor played by Vaughn, who soon spars with the British team supervising him over his care; and 1971’s “The Statue and “Clay Pigeon.”
From 1972-74 he did his third stint as the star of a TV series with “The Protectors,” playing Harry Rule, one of three freelance troubleshooters who run an international crime-fighting agency based in London.
In 1974, as the show ended, he did two feature films: “The Man From Independence,” in which Vaughn played Harry S Truman, and disaster movie “The Towering Inferno,” in which he played Senator Parker, who helps out once the blaze starts.