Richard Chamberlain
(Photo: Darlene Hammond/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
Richard Chamberlain, whose decades-long stage and screen career included celebrated performances in My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music on Broadway, has died. The actor passed away at his home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. He was 90. His publicist confirmed the cause was complications following a stroke.
George Richard Chamberlain was born on March 31, 1934, in Los Angeles, California. He overcame a difficult childhood marked by shyness to become one of the most recognizable leading men of his era. Achieving stardom in the hit NBC medical drama Dr. Kildare (1961–66), he became a particular hit with female fans, receiving 12,000 fan letters a week and winning a Golden Globe for his performance.
Though Hollywood initially typecast him as a romantic lead, Chamberlain sought to establish himself as an actor of wide-ranging roles. In 1966, he made his Broadway debut opposite Mary Tyler Moore in a musical adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The production closed after just four performances—“They shouted rude remarks and walked out in droves,” Chamberlain wrote in his 2003 memoir Shattered Love—but that did not deter his theatrical aspirations. He soon moved to England, where he won acclaim as Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1969, making him the first American to play the role on the British stage since John Barrymore in 1925.
Chamberlain returned to the New York stage, starring in Tom Babe’s Fathers and Sons (1977) at the Public Theater—he would call it his all-time favorite job—and in Broadway in The Night of the Iguana (1976), earning Drama Desk nominations for both performances.
In the 1980s, Chamberlain once again established himself as a dependable television leading man in miniseries including Shogun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983), receiving Emmy nominations for both, but he continued to be drawn to the stage, starring alongside Geraldine Page in Blithe Spirit in 1987.
In 1993, he played the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, first in a national tour and then on Broadway, followed by a European production (1995–96) that played in Germany, France and Switzerland. In 1999, he joined the Broadway revival of The Sound of Music as Captain von Trapp (opposite Laura Benanti’s Maria), receiving a glowing notice in The New York Times: “At 63, the trim, immaculately groomed actor still exudes lynxlike handsomeness,” the critic Peter Marks noted. “His performance is one of those rare instances of replacement casting that compels a theatergoer to ask, ‘Why didn’t they think of him in the first place?'” Chamberlain also starred in the subsequent national tour. In 2008–09, he starred in the national tour Spamalot.
In addition to acting, Chamberlain found fulfillment as a painter, exhibiting his work in Hawaii, where he had lived since 1990. He is survived by his lifelong partner, Martin Rabbett.
“Our beloved Richard is with the angels now,” said Rabbett said in a statement. “He is free and soaring to those loved ones before us. How blessed were we to have known such an amazing and loving soul. Love never dies. And our love is under his wings lifting him to his next great adventure,”
