Richard Chamberlain came to fame in the 1960s. The first episode of Dr. Kildare was broadcast in 1961, the first year of Kennedy's administration, and the last episode was screened in 1966, the year of Bob Dylan's motorbike accident, and two years after LBJ beat Goldwater, the man who wanted to nuke the Viet Cong. Richard Chamberlain was a massively popular romantic lead, though it's worth remembering that Dr. Kildare, (which was a resurrection of the old forties movies with Lew Ayres and Lionel Barrymore) put Richard Chamberlain on screen with Raymond Massey, the legendary Canadian actor who had played John Brown in The Santa Fe Trail with Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan and Black Michael in the Ronald Colman/Douglas Fairbanks Jr. version of The Prisoner of Zenda, an actor of towering presence and an absolute classical mastery of technique.
It must have been both daunting and inspiring for Chamberlain to share a screen with him because he was an actor's actor and one of the things that stares at us from the record of Richard Chamberlain's career is how much this born matinee idol wanted to be the real thing in terms of acting.
You’ll sometimes hear seasoned actors who established themselves with stage careers whatever celluloid glory might’ve followed, refer to one of their fellow players as “just a leading man”, and Richard Chamberlain palpably feared that this was all he was and made a very concerted attempt to prove those who sneered at him as a too-good looking face to be absolutely wrong.
It was in practice a hell of an effort. The secretly gay heartthrob who was said to have received more fan mail than Clark Gable really did give a damn. Post Dr. Kildare, he rushed to make his Broadway debut with the musical Holly Golightly, an adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Mary Tyler Moore, to see the show closed by the critics in preview before it could even start.
What stays in the memory is a very distinguished Ralph Touchett in a 1968 BBC TV serialization of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady.
It was the period when British television was every so often producing stars and Richard Chamberlain for all his mandatory closeting did make The Music Lovers in which he could give some sort of artistic representation to his sexuality as a very tortured Tchaikovsky partnered with one of the greatest of the BBC generated stars,