Richard Chamberlain, who has died at 90, achieved exceptional television celebrity by playing devastatingly attractive men whose professions made them unavailable to women.

In The Thorn Birds – a 1983 miniseries that achieved huge ratings for ABC in the US and BBC One in the UK – he was Ralph De Bricassart, a Catholic priest whose vow of celibacy is tested beyond breaking point over four decades by Meggie, a young woman whom he meets on an Australian sheep farm.

Based on a 1977 bestseller by Colleen McCullough, the drama benefited from finding a way of making attraction dangerous again in a post-60s era of sexual freedom. Watched by almost 60% of the available American TV audience – an extraordinarily high score – it got 16 Emmy nominations, winning six. Unusually, its British TV premiere – on 8 January 1984, between ratings hits Hi-De-Hi! and That’s Life! – was given a standalone preview programme in the previous week. Comprising an interview with Chamberlain, it was a tribute to his fame and the international impact of The Thorn Birds.

Making attraction dangerous again … Richard Chamberlain with Rachel Ward in The Thorn Birds. Photograph: Warner Bros. Television/Allstar

Repeated in 1988, the vestment-ripper became one of the most resonant TV memories for the Boomer generation. Chamberlain’s performance may have influenced the dashing celibate who became known as the “hot priest” in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.

The Thorn Birds required Ralph to be irresistible to women and his casting reflected a previous triumph as TV eye-candy – in 191 episodes of the NBC medical drama Dr Kildare, from 1961 to 1966. For Chamberlain’s Dr James Kildare, who rose from intern to resident at the fictional Blair General hospital, the throbbing hearts he heard through his stethoscope were mainly caused by him, not cardiac conditions. Patients were as off-limits as Bricassart’s parishioners would be later, although publicity pictures showed Chamberlain flushing a syringe that may have been suggestive. While Kildare was a good enough doctor to have removed his own appendix when caught in an emergency without a surgeon, the point of the character was his looks.

Heart-throbbing stuff … Chamberlain as Dr Kildare. Photograph: NBCUPHOTOBANK/Rex Features

Chamberlain’s facility for acting out the tensions of forbidden love may have been helped by the fact that the actor playing these famous objects of female desire was gay, a fact he did not confirm until a 2003 memoir. Recounting a relationship with the actor-producer Martin Rabbett that endured across five decades until Rabbett’s death, the book also reflected on the psychological cost of passing as straight on and off screen, with one lie perpetuating another. The Thorn Birds, for example, led to his casting as the legendarily heterosexual Casanova.

Some among younger generations of gay men may lament Chamberlain’s reticence about his sexuality, but there seems little doubt that lifelong honesty would have disqualified him from those career-making roles as Kildare and Bricassart at a time when, at least theoretical, sexual availability was seen as a crucial part of superstardom.

The third standout TV role of Chamberlain’s career is overshadowed by different sensitivities. In the 1980 version of Shōgun, the actor was typically charismatic and dashing in a five-part adaptation of James Clavell’s novel about John Blackthorne, an English sailor captured by samurai and forced to adopt Japanese identity, but the more culturally precise 2024 remake will outrank it in TV history.

A skilled enough actor to have played Hamlet to good notices on stage in England and on TV in the US, Chamberlain was at his best on television. His particular success in miniseries spoke to a rare ability to encourage viewers to come back night after night, week after week. His impact was shown by a steady flow of late-career cameos in shows including Nip/Tuck, Hustle and Will & Grace.