Obituary: Robert Vaughn

Robert Vaughn, the cleft-chinned actor who reached the peak of his fame in the 1960s playing Napoleon Solo, the debonair international agent tasked with saving the world each week on the hit television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., has died aged 83.

Vaughn had numerous roles in film and on television. He played an old boyfriend of Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) on an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show and a gunman in the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960). He was nominated for an Oscar for his role as a man accused of murder in The Young Philadelphians (1959) and won an Emmy in 1978 for his performance as a White House chief of staff in the miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors.

But no character Vaughn played was as popular as Napoleon Solo. From 1964-1968, in the thick of the Cold War, millions of Americas tuned in weekly to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to watch Vaughn, as a super-agent from the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, battling T.H.R.U.S.H. (Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity), a secret organisation intent on achieving world domination through nefarious if far-fetched devices like mind-controlling gas.

At the height of the show’s popularity, Vaughn said he was receiving 70,000 fan letters a month.

The show was a self-aware parody of Ian Fleming's James Bond, who had been played by Sean Connery in two hit movies by the time The Man from U.N.C.L.E. made its debut. (Fleming served as an adviser to the show, and is widely credited with coining the name "Napoleon Solo".)

Gigantic cartoon

"The whole show is a joke. It's an extension of the Bond joke into a gigantic cartoon in prime time," Vaughn told the Saturday Evening Post in an 1965 interview, to which, the magazine noted, he arrived wearing a custom-tailored Italian suit and a black silk tie.

Joke or not, the show was wildly popular and catapulted Vaughn into overnight fame.

It was also a platform for many other acting careers, most notably that of David McCallum, the Scottish actor who played enigmatic Russian spy Illya Kuryakin, and brought him a big fan following of his own. Kurt Russell (at age 10), Leslie Nielsen and Joan Collins all appeared on the show. In the first season, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who would co-star on Star Trek two years later, had roles in the same episode.

Despite his acclaim, Vaughn could be a little disdainful about his vocation. "Acting has always been very boring to me," he told the Post. "Anyone not in television to become a millionaire is a simpleton."

At the time, Vaughn was seemingly more focused on politics than show business: He often spoke publicly against the war in Vietnam.

“In our fervour to halt the potential spread of totalitarianism, what incredible precedent are we setting in Vietnam?” he asked in an impassioned speech. “By marching our legions through the countryside of foreign continents, burning homes, laying waste to the land and indiscriminately killing friend and foe alike?”

In 1967, Vaughn became national chairman of an organisation called Dissenting Democrats and debated the war with William F Buckley Jr on Buckley's television programme, Firing Line – a bout that Newsday, on Long Island, said Vaughn had won. "Vaughn suffered no wounds from Buckley's expert needling," the newspaper said.

RFK’s friend

Vaughn befriended attorney general Robert F Kennedy and was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill, Kennedy’s estate in McLean, Virginia, where the actor played touch football with luminaries such as writer Art Buchwald and astronaut John Glenn.

The Kennedys, Vaughn wrote in his name-dropping autobiography, A Fortunate Life (2008), were big fans of the show. "The house was covered with U.N.C.L.E. posters inside and out," he reported, "including pictures of me with my Walther P-38 at the ready."

Robert Francis Vaughn was born on November 22nd, 1932, in New York City into a theatrically inclined household. His father, Gerald Walter Vaughn, was heard on radio series such as Gangbusters and Crime Doctor, and his mother, the former Marcella Gaudel, appeared in a 1931 Broadway production of Dracula.

The couple divorced when Vaughn was an infant and he moved with his mother to Minneapolis, where he was partly reared by grandparents.

"I was a complete wreck as a child, emotionally unstable, excessively prideful," he told the Sunday News of New York in a 1965 interview.

Vaughn's mother encouraged him to act, teaching him to recite the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet when he was five. While working as a cocktail waitress in a Chicago bar, she had young Robert perform the soliloquy for John Barrymore after the legendary actor dropped in. She later helped get her son cast on radio shows such as Let's Pretend and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.

Vaughn headed to Hollywood in 1952. During the day he studied theatre arts at Los Angeles City College and played bit parts, including a Hebrew slave in the movie epic The Ten Commandments.

At night he would go to local hot-spots and hobnob with other aspirants and the occasional star. He hung out with Johnny Carson, dated Natalie Wood and knocked back Cutty Sark at 2am with Bette Davis. He also befriended a young James Coburn and took credit for getting him a role in The Magnificent Seven.

After he graduated from college in 1956, Vaughn signed with Columbia Pictures for $15,000 a role. His career was temporarily waylaid when he was drafted; he served uneventfully as a drill sergeant in the army and was discharged after 18 months.

After that, life was a series of increasingly high-profile parts, and then he landed U.N.C.L.E.. The show was such an initial success that he expected it to last for many years, but the ratings dropped, and it was cancelled halfway through its fourth series.

He kept busy afterwards, appearing on many TV shows and the occasional hit movie, such as Bullitt (1968) and The Towering Inferno (1974), both starring Steve McQueen. He also travelled extensively. He was in Prague in 1968, filming The Bridge at Remagen, when Soviet tanks rolled into the city to suppress the local reform movement.

Blacklist study

Vaughn earned a doctorate in communications from the University of Southern California in 1970. His dissertation, The Influence of the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the American Theater 1938-58, was published as a book, Only Victims, in 1972.

But the farther away he got from U.N.C.L.E., the more Vaughn found himself taking roles that he characterised as "not quality," among them a millionaire looking to dominate the world through computers in Superman III (1983) and a mercenary in Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), Roger Corman's low-budget sci-fi epic that was The Magnificent Seven in space.

In the late 1980s he acted as pitchman in an infomercial for the Helsinki Formula, which claimed to be a cure for baldness. The Federal Trade Commission eventually prevented the manufacturers from making this claim, but by then they had sold $100 million worth of the product.

In a 1993 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Vaughn was unapologetic about his work as a Helsinki Formula spokesman: "That was about the most profitable thing I've ever done in my life. Every call that came in on the 800 number, I got a piece of that."

During one of his rare returns to stage acting, he appeared in a production of The Tender Trap in Chicago in 1970. Also in the cast was Linda Staab, whom he married in 1974. With his Hollywood stature on the decline, they moved to a castle-like stone home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1981.

Vaughn continued to work as an actor into his 80s. He starred in the BBC series Hustle from 2004-2012 and even appeared in 13 episodes of Coronation Street in 2013.

Toward the end of his life, Vaughn’s view of acting, and of his luck in having a long show business career, grew rosier. As he put it in his autobiography, “With a modest amount of looks and talent, and more than a modicum of serendipity, I’ve managed to stretch my 15 minutes of fame into 50 years of good fortune.”

Robert Vaughn is survived by his wife Linda Staab, daughter Caitlin Vaughn, son Cassidy, and two grandchildren.