Robert Vaughn, best-known for playing Napoleon Solo on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., has died at 83 following a battle with acute leukemia.

His manager Matthew Sulivan released a statement saying: “Mr. Vaughn passed away (in New York) with his family around him”.

Vaughn, survived by wife Linda, son Cassidy and daughter Caitlin, was born in New York to show business parents and rose to prominence when he gained an Oscar nomination for his role in the 1959 movie The Young Philadelphians.

David McCallum and Vaugn were hugely popular in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Photo: AAP

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 boosted the actor’s profile, but his brand of sophisticated urbanite did not mesh well with a career in Westerns.

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, was a pop-culture phenomenon in the mid-1960s.

Vaughn’s father was a radio actor and his mother a stage actress.

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.