Despite becoming a lauded stage and film actor, Richard Chamberlain, who has died aged 90, carried the label of soap-opera star around his neck for most of his career of more than five decades.
It began with his huge success in the hospital television series Dr Kildare (1961-66), in which Chamberlain’s clean-cut good looks were the prime attraction, bringing him thousands of fan letters a week. Chamberlain’s other immensely successful television roles came in three mini-series, Centennial (1978-79), Shogun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983).
His perfectly chiselled features, which made him ideal for romantic leads in soap operas, prevented many producers from visualising him in more demanding roles. However, through talent and determination he starred in numerous films and on the stage in parallel to his television work.
Born in Los Angeles, he had a cool relationship with his alcoholic father, Charles, a salesman, but a warm one with his mother, Elsa (nee Von Benzon). At Beverly Hills high school, he excelled in athletics, and his good grades enabled him to study art history and painting at Pomona College, southern California, where he was able to satisfy his dream of becoming an actor in plays by Shakespeare, Shaw and Arthur Miller. After graduating, Chamberlain served 16 months in Korea, where he was made company clerk of his infantry company, later promoted to the rank of sergeant.
On his return to the US, Chamberlain studied acting with Jeff Corey, who became renowned as a teacher after being blacklisted in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Although Corey’s sense-memory Stanislavskian method is not immediately apparent in Chamberlain’s performances, the actor claimed to have learned how to tap into his own emotions and psyche. At the time, he was struggling with having to “live a lie” about his sexuality.
In 1959, Chamberlain, Leonard Nimoy and Vic Morrow were among the founders of the Company of Angels, a repertory theatre in Los Angeles. While playing there in La Ronde and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Chamberlain started to get parts in television series. His first feature films were The Secret of the Purple Reef (1960), a low-voltage, low-budget thriller shot in Puerto Rico, and A Thunder of Drums (1961), a western in which he was hardly noticeable as a young cavalry officer.
Then came the role of Dr Kildare, for which Chamberlain beat 35 other candidates. In the first episode, the senior medic Dr Leonard Gillespie (Raymond Massey) tells Chamberlain, as the young, earnest, caring James Kildare, an intern at Blair general hospital: “Our job is to keep people alive, not to tell them how to live.” Kildare ignores the advice, thus supplying the basis for most of the plots of the next 190 episodes across five seasons.
In 1962, with his popularity at its height, he recorded a hit song, Three Stars Will Shine Tonight, based on the music of the show’s hummable opening theme. It revealed that Chamberlain had a fine singing voice, which he used on a number of singles and an album, Richard Chamberlain Sings (1962), and much later as leads in stage musicals such as My Fair Lady (1993), The Sound of Music (1998), Scrooge (2004), The King and I (2006) and Monty Python’s Spamalot (2009).
When Dr Kildare ended, Chamberlain decided to prove that he was not just a pretty face, by appearing in summer stock productions of The Philadelphia Story and Private Lives (both 1966).
He then worked for three years in Britain, on television, stage and film. He was excellent as Ralph Touchett in the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady (1968).The role got him noticed by Peter Dews, the artistic director of Birmingham repertory theatre, who offered him the chance to play Hamlet in 1969.
The play was a sell-out for its limited five and a half week run, and in the main, the British critics were positive, with the Times reflecting the consensus: “Anyone who comes to this production prepared to scoff at the sight of a popular television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet, will be in for a deep disappointment.” The Daily Mail commented that “the perturbed spirit of Dr Kildare may rest at last. In Mr Chamberlain we have no mean actor.”
In films, he was a noble Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar (1970), and a striking Lord Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb (1973), and he was able to express some of his own angst and sexual liberation as a gay Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971). At this time, it was an open showbiz secret that Chamberlain was romantically involved with the US actor Wesley Eure.
The rest of the films he made in the 1970s – The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), in which he played Aramis; The Slipper and the Rose (1976), almost typecast as Prince Charming; and the disaster movies The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Swarm (1978) – were lucrative but hardly challenging. He was more stretched in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), shot in Australia, where he was the initially smug lawyer defending a group of Indigenous Australians accused of murder.
In the meantime, Chamberlain had made a triumphant Broadway debut in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana (1976-77) at Circle in the Square theatre. According to one critic, Chamberlain, as the defrocked priest now a tour guide, “captures the self-lacerating torment of Reverend Shannon”. During the run, he started a relationship with Martin Rabbett, a production assistant on the play. They remained together until 2010, and later resumed their partnership.
In the 80s, Chamberlain established himself again on television, earning the nickname “king of the miniseries”. Shogun, based on James Clavell’s novel, starred Chamberlain as Pilot-Major John Blackthorne, an Englishman trying to gain acceptance in early 17th-century Japan. Chamberlain, long-haired and black-bearded, held his own among a cast of superb Japanese actors that included the dynamic Toshiro Mifune.
In The Thorn Birds, he was sexy Father Ralph de Bricassart, the Roman Catholic priest who carries on a tortured, illicit romance with Meggie Cleary, played by Rachel Ward, in the Australian outback. It was disliked by Colleen McCullough, the author of the original 1977 bestseller. She said: “It was instant vomit! Ward couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag and Chamberlain wandered about all wet and wide-eyed.” Nevertheless, the 10-hour, four-part, $23m show became one of the most watched TV series ever.
Chamberlain continued to move between films, television and theatre, and his homes in Hawaii and Los Angeles, over the next decades. He was a guest star on the TV comedy series Will & Grace (2005), and his final film role came as an acting coach in Finding Julia (2019).
In 2003, in his memoir, Shattered Love, he wrote about his dislike of himself for not being true to himself in order to protect his matinee idol image, but in coming out he “finally made friends with life”.
He is survived by Rabbett.
• George Richard Chamberlain, actor, born 31 March 1934; died 29 March 2025
• Ronald Bergan died in 2020
