Patrick Macnee's son Rupert announced his actor father passed away in California at the age of 93. He was best known for portraying secret agent John Steed in the 1960s British television show, The Avengers.
I was a young teenage boy when the series began syndication in the United States so you'll excuse me if I paid a bit more attention to his co-star Diana Rigg and Emma Peel's Lotus Elans than to Macnee and John Steed's prewar Bentleys. However, Steed's talent and his deadpan delivery were major factors in the show's success. It ran for 6 years on the BBC, was syndicated for decades in the U.S. and you can still probably find it in reruns somewhere in the cable universe.
With the classic Bentleys and the Elan, The Avengers has been a favorite of car enthusiasts since the show first ran, but I had no idea just how car-centric the series was.
Somehow, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Thrush Buster didn't catch on the way the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee did.
Of course, any secret agent movie or TV show will necessarily have a car chase or three, so there are bound to be some cool cars used in filming, but the number of cars-of-interest-to-enthusiasts used in The Avengers is truly impressive. While Macnee's character has been associated with Bentleys, Steed originally drove a Rolls Royce, followed by an A.C. Greyhound, a Triumph Herald, an Alvis, and a Lagonda before using mostly Bentleys starting in season four.
A shot of Emma Peel's blue Series 3 Lotus Elan because Diana Rigg.
The Avengers Forever website has five pages devoted just to John Steed's cars, along with sections for the vehicles that the Peel character drove (plus the cars driven by Peel's predecessor Cathy Gale, played by Honor Blackman, better known as Pussy Galore in the James Bond Goldfinger movie), as well as vehicles associated with secondary characters Tara, Mother, and Forbes. Someone on the production team must have liked Lotuses, since in addition to the white and blue Elans Peel drove, the show also featured an Europa and an Elan +2. A site devoted to the John Steed character (and Macnee), John Steed's Flat, also has a detailed section on the cars driven in the series. If that isn't enough, if you like British cars, you can get lost for hours at the Internet Movie Car Database's Avengers page.
My favorite John Steed car was from the later The New Avengers series. In that show Macnee drove a Rover 3500 SD1 and a flared fender Jaguar XJ12C, essentially a road-going replica of a Jaguar Broadspeed race car. The XJC (the C is for coupe) is the most beautiful iteration of one of the best looking cars of all time and the Broadspeed cars were the maximum versions of the XJC.
As for the late Macnee, he owned 2.5% of The Avengers' profits so he could probably afford both classic and modern Bentleys, but it so happens he wasn't much of a car guy. If Steed's interest in cars appeared genuine, it was due to Macnee's skill as an actor. When the show became a success, he bought a fashionable Jaguar S Type sedan, but he didn't like to drive. In a 1968 interview with the Schenectady Gazette newspaper, he said, "I don't enjoy driving. I do run a Jaguar S type, but I hate it and often lend it to my friends. As for driving in the tiny sports cars used in the series, it frightens me to death".
Nobody would describe a prewar Bentley as a tiny sports car. They're large vehicles no matter how sporting they were. While Macnee may have shot scenes behind the wheel of more modern machinery, the Bentleys on The Avengers were mostly props. Macnee never really learned how to drive them, keeping them in third gear for all of the motion shots where he was filmed in the car. At slow speeds, the cars would be pushed into the frame by hands in the crew. Genuine action shots required a double/stunt driver.
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS
The post Remembering Patrick MacNee and The Many Avengers Cars appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
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