Hi everyone and thank you for tuning in to episode 92 of awards, the Hollywood Reporters Awards Podcast.

I'm the host Scott Feinberg and my guest today is Robert Vaughn, a bona fide Hollywood

legend who is about to return to the silver screen in his first leading role in years.

Vaughn, who is now 83 and based in Connecticut where we sat down for this interview,

is best known for playing the skittish veteran Lee, one of seven gunfighters who ride to the rescue of an oppressed village in the 1960 version of the Magnificent Seven.

In fact, he's the last of that film's seven principal actors who's still with us.

Over the course of an illustrious career that has spanned more than 60 years, he also received

an Oscar nomination for his performance in 1959's The Young Philadelphia's.

And he racked up a ton of major credits, including

1956 is the Ten Commandments, 1968's bullet, 1974 is the Towering

Inferno, 1981's S. O. B. and a host of great parts on television, including and especially

that of the Bond-like spy Napoleon Solo on the man from Uncle, which ran from 1964

through 1968, and made him a top star and

President Nixon's chief of staff HR Haldeman on the 1977 mini series

Washington behind closed doors for which he won an Emmy.

His latest film is called Gold Star.

It's the low budget feature debut of the young writer, director actress Victoria

Negri, based on her experience with her much older father after he suffered a debilitating stroke, and it features one of the most complex performances of Vaughn's career, not least because he's wheelchair bound and unable to communicate with words throughout it.

The film will have its world premiere as the opening night screening of the Buffalo International Film Festival on

the evening of Friday, October 7th, but I had the privilege of seeing it and sitting down with Vaughn ahead of that.

Over the course of our conversation, we talk about how he first developed an interest in acting and decided to move out to Hollywood,

whereupon he developed a very close friendship with Natalie Wood to whom he feels he owes a lot of his early opportunities. We also get into how he won and then lost the part in the 1957 classic The Sweet Smell of Success and

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