Robert Vaughn, who starred as Napoleon Solo on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., has died acute leukemia, his manager Matthew Sullivan says.
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.
Vaughn vaulted into the public eye with his vaunted performance in the soapy 1959 Paul Newman feature The Young Philadelphians, for which Vaughn was nominated for an Oscar 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 next year he was one of the stars of John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven, 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.
Robert Francis Vaughn was born in New York City to parents in show business, his father a radio actor and his mother an actress on the stage.
He went to high school in Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota, where he majored in journalism, but quit after a year.
Moving to Los Angeles, he studied drama at Los Angeles City College, then transferred to Cal State LA and completed his Master's degree.
Subsequently -- and while having already started a busy acting career in the 1960s and into the 1970s -- he completed a Ph.D. in communications at USC.
The subject of his thesis was the blacklisting of Hollywood entertainers during the McCarthy era, and it was published in 1972 as Only Victims.
