Alan Caillou, top to bottom:

in “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”

(1965); in “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo” (1977); as The Head in “Quark” (1978). Left, with Albert Paulsen in “U.N.C.L.E.” episode “The Terbuf Affair” (1964).

Alan Caillou

d. October 1, 2006

Alan Caillou, entertainment industry veteran known to spy fans for both writing and performing work, died Oct. 1 at his home in Sedona, Ariz. He was 91.

He was born Alan Lyle-Smythe in Surrey, England, and reportedly adopted Alan Caillou as an alias while serving in the British Army’s intelligence corps during World War II. He worked behind enemy lines in North Africa and with the partisans in Yugoslavia. He trained as an actor in the 1930s, then served four years with the British police force in Palestine. After the war, he worked as a police chief in Ethiopia, a district officer in Somalia and founded a Shakespearian theatrical company in Tanganyika before moving to Canada, where he worked in theater, radio and television.

He and his wife moved to Hollywood in the late 1950s, where Caillou immediately found work as both a writer and actor in the growing television business. He appeared in episodes of Cheyenne, Maverick, Flipper, The Third Man, Combat, Burke’s Law, Jericho, The Rat Patrol, The Name of the Game, McMillan and Wife, Mannix, The Six Million Dollar Man and others. He once made a non-acting appearance as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s comic quiz show You Bet Your Life.

He also got small parts in such movies as “The List of Adrian Messenger,” “Five Weeks in a Balloon,” “Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion” and “The Devil’s Brigade.” His roles seemed to reflect his background as he was often cast as British army officers, policemen and spies in both movies and television. He played Inspector Lestrade in the 1972 ABC Movie of the Week version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” with Stewart Granger as Sherlock Holmes.

His only two regular TV series roles were brief and soon forgotten. In 1966, Caillou was cast in NBC’s new Tarzan series as Jason Flood, tutor to the orphan boy Jai, whose normal function in the series was to hang around Tarzan and get into trouble. The tutor character was extraneous and eventually disappeared. In Quark, the short-lived 1978 sci-fi comedy starring Richard Benjamin, Caillou portrayed “The Head,” who was head of the galactic government and appeared only as a gigantic disembodied head.

Caillou’s first television writing included several episodes of Behind Closed Doors, the 1958 spy anthology, and he continued in the espionage and thriller vein with scripts for 77 Sunset Strip, Thriller, The Fugitive, The Rogues, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Rat Patrol, Garrison’s Gorillas and The Six Million Dollar Man. In 1961 he had an acting role in an episode of Thriller that he also wrote, and repeated the trick on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Caillou wrote five popular U.N.C.L.E. episodes in that show’s first season and appeared in one of them, “The Terbuf Affair,” as the secret-police chief of a tiny Balkan nation. He wrote two second-season U.N.C.L.E. scripts and acted in one of those, “The Tigers Are Coming Affair.”

He appeared in an episode of the 1959 spy series Five Fingers, and in Amos Burke Secret Agent, Jericho and two episodes of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., but did not write for those shows. He wrote one episode of It Takes a Thief and acted in three, but didn’t appear in the one he wrote.

Caillou also wrote dozens of mystery and adventure novels, many featuring series characters such as Cabot Cain and Colonel Matthew Tobin.