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For TV viewers in the early 1960s, there were two popular choices for favorite physician: the surly Ben Casey, played by Vince Edwards, and the sensitive Dr. Kildare, portrayed by Richard Chamberlain. The role made Chamberlain a household name and an unlikely teen idol. After Dr. Kildare ended its five-season NBC run, the actor–who passed away over the weekend–would go on to star in movie and stage roles and become a familiar presence in TV mini-series for the next half-century.
Born, appropriately enough, in Beverly Hills in 1934, Chamberlain graduated from Beverly Hills High School and Pomona College and served in the Army for two years in South Korea. Upon leaving the military he co-founded the L.A.-based theatre group Company of Angels alongside such future notables as Vic Morrow, Leonard Nimoy, and Vic Tayback. At the same time, Richard appeared in guest shots in such TV shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, and Riverboat and made his film debut in 1960’s The Secret of the Purple Reef, a Caribbean-based thriller he once described as “easily the worst movie ever made, or at least the most boring.”
Chamberlain’s big break came in 1961, when MGM decided to make a TV series based on its 1940s Dr. Kildare film franchise. After William Shatner and James Franciscus turned it down, Richard was signed by play the idealistic young intern of Blair General Hospital, continually getting personally involved in his patients’ lives against the advice of his mentor, Dr. Gillespie (Raymond Massey). The show became a top 10 hit and even had folks writing to its star for medical advice. Chamberlain was regularly featured on the covers of teen magazines and had a hit single with his rendition of “Theme from Dr. Kildare (Three Stars Will Shine Tonight).”
After hanging up his TV stethoscope in 1966, Chamberlain tried his hand at Broadway, co-starring with Mary Tyler Moore in an ill-fated musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s which shut down while in previews. Undaunted, he journeyed to England and continued stage work, playing the prince of Denmark in a Birmingham Repertory Theatre production of Hamlet. He was also seen in such films as Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) and with Katharine Hepburn in The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969).
The 1970s found Richard in high demand. Moviegoers saw him as composer Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971); the poet Lord Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb (1972); swordsman Aramis in The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974); and as the handsome prince who falls for Cinderella in the fairy tale musical The Slipper and the Rose (1976). Chamberlain joined the all-star casts of producer Irwin Allen’s disaster epics The Towering Inferno (also ’74) and The Swarm (1978), and won critical acclaim for his turn in Australian director Peter Weir’s eerie 1977 suspenser The Last Wave.
On the small screen, Chamberlain starred in several made-for-TV films. He was Britain’s King Edward VIII in 1972’s The Woman I Love, the title author in 1974’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Last of the Belles, and Dumas’ heroes in 1976’s The Count of Monte Cristo and the following year’s The Man in the Iron Mask. He also portrayed real-life WWII Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who risked his life to save Jewish refugees from extermination, in 1985’s Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story and two years later was the title ladies’ man in Casanova, co-starring Faye Dunaway.
1978 found him cast as a Scottish fur trapper in 18th-century Colorado in the James A. Michener saga Centennial, the first of several successful mini-series to feature Chamberlain. Next was the original 1980 version of James Clavell’s Shogun, set in feudal Japan and following Richard’s English sailor John Blackthorne attempts to navigate rival factions vying for political and military power. In 1983 he was a Catholic priest in 1920s Australia–and in a forbidden romance with a beautiful rancher (Rachel Ward)–in ABC’s ratings-topping adaptation of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. He would return to the role 13 years later in The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years. Richard was the first person to play Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac ex-CIA agent, Jason Bourne, in a 1988 mini-series version of The Bourne Identity, and he co-starred with Lauren Bacall in 1999’s Too Rich: The Secret Life of Doris Duke.
Chamberlain explored the wilds of Africa as H. Rider Haggard’s “great white hunter” hero, Allan Quatermain, in a pair of Indiana Jones-influenced actioners, King’s Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), both with a young Sharon Stone. 1989 saw Richard return to medicine–this time as a Hawaii-born doctor who comes home after years of working on the mainland–in the short-lived CBS drama Island Son, and he took on the role of deranged killer Harry Powell, played on the big screen by Robert Michum, in a 1991 TV movie remake of Night of the Hunter. During this time he was also appearing on Broadway in revivals of My Fair Lady in 1993 and The Sound of Music six years later.
The new millennium found the actor spending more time on his Hawaiian estate and less in front of audiences and cameras. Richard played King Arthur in the 2008-09 touring company of Monty Python’s Spamalot. He made guest turns on such shows as Will & Grace, The Drew Carey Show (in drag as Craig Ferguson’s mother!), Nip/Tuck, and a Season Five recurring role on Brothers and Sisters, with his final TV appearance coming in the 2017 Twin Peaks revival. His last film roles were as–of all things–a deranged doctor in director Joe Dante’s installment of the 2018 horror anthology Nightmare Cinema and as an acting teacher in 2019’s indie drama Finding Julia.
It wasn’t until his 2003 book “Shattered Love: A Memoir” that Chamberlain publicly announced he was gay. “When I grew up, being gay, being a sissy or anything like that, was verboten,” he told a TV interviewer, later adding “I can talk about it now because I’m not afraid anymore.” The actor’s death in Hawaii on March 29th, brought on by complications from a stroke, came just a few days before his 91st birthday.