Patrick Macnee played John Steed for eight years as a man who carried an umbrella instead of a gun and never hurried. He listens to his partners better than almost any leading man of the period, and The Avengers is still worth an evening because of it.
Fi1m perspective
John Steed listens to the villain of the week explain his plan with the polite interest of a man being told about someone else's holiday. He has an umbrella where the other spies have pistols, a bowler hat, and a manner that says nothing on screen is quite serious enough to run for. Then he turns out to be exactly where he needs to be. Patrick Macnee kept that up across 161 episodes, and it is harder than it looks.
He had been working for years before anyone gave him a bowler. There was Royal Navy service in the war, small film parts in the early 1950s, among them the young Jacob Marley in Scrooge (1951), then repertory, Canadian television and guest roles in America. Cast as Steed in The Avengers (1961), he became the lead after the first series and stayed to 1969, while the programme turned from gritty crime into espionage played with a widening smile. The producers told him, by his own account, "Have you read the James Bond books? Go away and make up a character." What he made was Bond's opposite: courteous, unarmed and amused. Partners came and went, Honor Blackman's Cathy Gale, Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, Linda Thorson's Tara King, and Steed did not compete with any of them.
That is the thing he does that other leading men do not. In our review of The Avengers we noticed that each performance leaves room for the other's reaction, and that is Macnee's doing as much as Rigg's. He waits, he watches, he lets her have the line. We found ourselves smiling at their exchanges before the jokes arrived, and the reason, when we looked for it, is that Macnee is plainly enjoying her company more than the plot, so we did too. The mysteries are thin. He treats them as thin, which is honest of him and good for the programme.
The bill for playing one man so well came later. The New Avengers (1976–1977) brought Steed back with new partners and did not recover what the earlier series had. After that the parts were supporting ones in American television and films, and most of them wanted the same equipment: a knighted gentleman with good manners in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), another in A View to a Kill (1985). Casting directors knew what they were buying, and he supplied it without complaint into the early 2000s.
Start with the Rigg years, where the partnership is at its most even. If an umbrella in a fistfight strikes you as absurd, Macnee agrees with you, and he is counting on it.
Biography
Patrick Macnee was a British-American actor. Born in Paddington, London, in 1922, he was educated at Eton College and served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War before beginning his acting career in British theatre and television.
He became best known for portraying the secret agent John Steed in the television series The Avengers (1961–1969), appearing in all but two of its 161 episodes after initially serving as a supporting character. He later reprised the role in The New Avengers (1976–1977).
Macnee appeared in numerous other television series and films, including The Twilight Zone (1959), The Howling (1981), This Is Spinal Tap (1984), A View to a Kill (1985), Murder, She Wrote (1984) and Frasier (1993). He died in 2015.
