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CARROLL, LEO G. (1886-1972). British actor.
As he gradually shifted his attention from the stage to the screen, Carroll
garnered little attention portraying two famous victims—Marley in A
Christmas Carol and King Duncan in Macbeth—but the perceptive Alfred
HITCHCOCK recognized his remarkable
talents and employed him as a supporting character in six films, most notably in
the seriously strange North by Northwest as the unnamed "Professor" in
charge of a shadowy intelligence agency who recruits the inadvertently
involved Cary Grant to help him capture a notorious enemy agent—prefiguring
his most memorable role as Alexander Waverly, head of television's United
Network Command for Law and Enforcement. On television, his short-lived series Topper
was not particularly funny, or particularly successful, but it must be admitted
that he was a better Topper than Roland Young, and unlike that actor, he was
able to function as the genuine centerpiece of his contrived adventures as the
befuddled victim of two manipulative ghosts. But Carroll was less effective as
the misguided (and miscast) scientist whose experiments engender Jack
ARNOLD's enormous Tarantula,
perhaps because this obviously capable actor could not persuasively oversee the
blunder-ridden research project that led to that monster, perhaps because he
was visibly uncomfortable when the script required him to put on some monstrous
makeup of his own.
Concealing his true age by telling reference books that he had been
born in 1892, not 1886, Carroll soldiered on to his greatest triumph in the
1960s, while he approached his eighties, demonstrating by his stamina if not
his muscularity that he did indeed come from a military background and had fought
with distinction in World War I. For without discounting the acting skills of
Robert VAUGHN and David
MCCALLUM, one must acknowledge that Leo G. Carroll was one key reason for the
success of the spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., effortlessly
projecting a sort of distracted avuncularity as the young agents' leader while
also conveying an underlying shrewdness that gave viewers confidence in the
soundness of all his convoluted schemes. Indeed, the series may have gotten on
the air primarily because the producers savvily replaced the pilot's spymaster,
Will Kuluva, with the superior Carroll. As additional evidence of Carroll's
value to the series, one might logically surmise that the failure of the
series' attempted revival, with The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The
Fifteen Years Later Affair (1983), largely stemmed from the fact that new
U.N.C.L.E. leader Patrick MACNEE,
for all his charm and self-confidence, could not quite match Carroll's aura of
commanding intelligence. But even Carroll's competent support could not
sufficiently animate the antics of Stefanie Powers and Noel Harrison in The
Girl from U.N.C.L.E. to make that spinoff series popular, and the resulting
overexposure of Carroll and his organization may have contributed to the
original series' premature demise in 1968.
Still, having celebrated his eightieth birthday by working
simultaneously in two prime-time series, Carroll may have been secretly pleased
when The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. ended, followed in a few months by The
Man from U.N.C.L.E., since old men can get tired when constantly involved
in young men's business and might start to long for some rest. Certainly, he
displayed no ill-will toward the series that replaced The Man from
U.N.C.L.E., Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, since he appeared in its
first episode, in character as Alexander Waverly, to help viewers transition to
the new series. But he had enough energy left to finally play a starring role
in a film, incongruously a country-music musical called From Nashville with
Music (1969), and to appear in a 1970 episode of Ironside, before he
got to enjoy two years of retirement until his death in 1972. But for a long
time, he served his craft honorably as an old, old soldier who refused to fade
away.
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