Richard Chamberlain obituary: dashing star of Dr. Kildare, Shōgun and The Three Musketeers
Becoming a TV heartthrob as Dr Kildare, the American actor went on to become ‘king of the miniseries’ and big-screen costume adventures.
A combination of good looks and impeccable control meant that Richard Chamberlain, who died two days before his 91st birthday, was never quite afforded his due as an actor. The son of an alcoholic shop fittings salesman, he was born in Beverly Hills (“the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevard”) on 31 March 1934. Having hidden the fact he was gay to serve in the US military in post-war Korea, he later returned to Los Angeles to study with blacklisted actor Jeff Corey.
A debut appearance on Alfred Hitchcock Presents proved fortunate, as Raymond Massey had been so impressed with the newcomer playing his son that he warmly endorsed his casting in NBC’s new medical drama, Dr. Kildare (1961 to 1966). Spun off from a series of MGM programmers starring Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore as James Kildare and Leonard Gillespie, the programme tackled previously taboo conditions with such authenticity that Chamberlain regularly got letters asking for advice.
Despite winning a Golden Globe and receiving more weekly fan mail than Clark Gable in his heyday, Chamberlain was relieved when the series ended, as he considered Kildare to be priggishly perfect, while the intensity of his pin-up celebrity left him in constant dread that his sexuality would be exposed and his career ruined. Hence, his decision to spend time in Britain, learning his craft in a BBC adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady (1968) and a Birmingham stage production of Hamlet that wowed the critics and was nominated for a Grammy when the cast recording of the US TV recreation was released as a double album.
His film roles in this period were also designed to shatter the Kildare image, as he oozed callous entitlement as Julie Christie’s abusive socialite husband in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), treated wife Glenda Jackson abominably as Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (1971) – which included an infamous romp on the floor of a railway carriage – and bristled with foppish subversiveness as Lord Byron in Robert Bolt’s Lady Caroline Lamb (1972).
Chamberlain reunited with Lester to play the charismatically spiritual Aramis in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its two sequels, which led to further excursions into Dumas territory. Indeed, he proved such a dashing man of action in The Count of Monte Cristo (1975) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1977) that he was cast as H. Rider Haggard’s bullish adventurer in King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986).
Yet, while he enjoyed playing the villain in John Guillermin’s disaster movie The Towering Inferno (1974), and brought dignified intensity to the role of the liberal lawyer who discovers some apocalyptic prophecies while defending a First Nations group on a murder charge in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), Chamberlain will best be remembered as “the king of the miniseries”.
He started with a couple of episodes as 18th-century Scottish trader Alexander McKeag in Centennial (1978 to 1979) before hitting his stride in Shōgun (1980) as Pilot Major John Blackthorne, who seeks to attain samurai status by aiding Lord Toranaga (Toshiro Mifune) in his dealings with the Portuguese traders and Jesuits priests operating in Japan in the early 1600s. Chamberlain won a Golden Globe for a role that has since been criticised as an example of white saviourism.
Another Golden Globe followed for his sensitively sensual portrayal of Fr Ralph de Bricassart, who falls for parishioner Meggie Cleary (Rachel Ward) in 1920s New South Wales in The Thorn Birds (1983). Author Colleen McCullough called the four-parter “instant vomit”, but it commanded a 59% share of the US television audience and Chamberlain returned for the less successful sequel, The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years (1996).
By this time he had played Edward VIII, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Casanova, Jason Bourne and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved around 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Moreover, in the 1991 TV adaptation of David Grubbs’ novel The Night of the Hunter, he played Harry Powell with an invidious stealth that contrasted with the more muscular menace that Robert Mitchum had displayed in Charles Laughton’s 1955 film version. His later years, however, were divided between the stage and knowing cameos after he came out in his 2003 autobiography.
Richard Chamberlain, 31 March 1934 to 29 March 2025