Ian MacNaughton was born in Glasgow and educated at Strathallan School in Perthshire. His elder brother was killed in World War II. He spent a year in medical school before abandoning his plans to become a doctor and joining the Royal Marines for a year in 1945. While serving with the Royal Marines in an officers' training squad at Deal, Kent, he was offered the chance to act with the Globe Players which was the Royal Marines amateur dramatics group. After he was demobilised in 1946, he returned to Glasgow, where his father hoped he would join the family firm. However, he decided to apply for a one-year pre-RADA course in London, which he completed, though he did not enter the Academy itself.
On his return to Scotland, MacNaughton spent several years acting on stage, regularly appearing in productions at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow and the Gateway Theatre in Edinburgh. Most notably in 1948 he appeared in Tyrone Guthrie's production of David Lyndsay's A Satire of the Three Estates at the Edinburgh Festival.
MacNaughton started his film career with a small role as the police constable in the 1953 film Laxdale Hall, a British romantic comedy set in a village in the Scottish Highlands. In the same year he also had a small role in Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue as Callum MacGregor. In 1955 MacNaughton moved back to London, and was cast as Able Seaman McIntosh in Seagulls over Sorrento and as Haggis in the 1956 science fiction film X the Unknown. He then appeared in three episodes of the British television comedy show Hancock's Half Hour and had small roles in the films The Silent Enemy and The Safecracker.

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