NYT: Robert Vaughn, Who Starred as Napoleon Solo in ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.,’ Dies at 83
By LESLIE
KAUFMAN
NOV. 11, 2016
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.,” died on
Friday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83. His
manager, Matthew Sullivan, said that the cause was acute leukemia, for which
Mr. Vaughn had been under treatment in Manhattan and Connecticut.
Mr. 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 Magnificent Seven” (1960). He was nominated for an Academy Award
as best supporting actor 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 mini-series “Washington: Behind Closed Doors.”
But no
character he played was as popular as Napoleon Solo. From 1964 to 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 Mr. Vaughn, as a superagent 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
organization intent on achieving world domination through nefarious if
far-fetched devices like mind-controlling gas.
At the
height of the show’s popularity, Mr. Vaughn said he was receiving 70,000 fan
letters a month. The show
was a self-aware parody of Ian Fleming’s creation 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.)
“The whole
show is a joke. It’s an extension of the Bond joke into a gigantic cartoon in
prime time,” Mr. 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.
Robert Francis Vaughn
1932 - 2016
Much more about UNCLE:
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