How Does Anyone Get to Look That Good: Remembering Richard Chamberlain

On the set of Murder by Phone

“Come and have lunch with me and Richard Chamberlain,” ordered my dear friend Prudence Emery on the phone. Many years later, we would collaborate on a series of mystery novels set in her old stomping grounds at London’s iconic Savoy Hotel.

But at the time, having returned to Canada, she was much-in-demand as a unit publicist for movie productions shooting around the world.

Every so often I would get a call from her. “Basiekins!”—I was always Basiekins—“get on a plane and come to Isreal.” Or, “Basiekins, join me in a snowbank in Barkerville, British Columbia.” Or, “Come and get drunk with Oliver Reed in Montreal.”

This time the marching orders specified lunch with Richard Chamberlain.

He was in town making a now-forgotten thriller called Murder by Phone (it also was known as Bells). Shogun, the ground-breaking television mini-series in which he starred as John Blackthorne was about to be aired. It had yet to erupt into the phenomenon that transformed television—and Richard Chamberlain.

As we sat in a downtown Toronto restaurant once he was finished shooting for the day, he was still best remembered as the twenty-something heartthrob from TV’s Dr. Kildare.

Richard turned out to be a sweet engaging man, forthright about his career. But what struck me more than anything else, even with his John Blackthorne beard from Shogun still in place, was his beauty. I couldn’t keep my eyes off him, thinking, Come on, no one can look that good.

Television and film did not do him justice. Even so, that finely chiseled face with its dramatic cheekbones had not always been helpful. He got the role of Blackthorne by default, he conceded, after Albert Finney and Sean Connery passed.

The hellish months filming in Japan, the unremitting heat, the cultural differences, and the fact he was in nearly every scene in the five-part 180-minute series had taken a toll on him and the entire cast. Having survived what had been an ordeal, he was looking forward to the telecast, hoping that Shogun would bring him more work as a leading man.

He confessed his insecurity about acting on film. For a long time, he doubted his own worth. He felt that he had been unable to shake off a certain distant formality he brought to the roles he played.

The movie stars he knew were at ease in front of a camera. He wasn’t. Sitting in an airport, he read a review by the influential critic, Pauline Kael, in which she said he was foisted off as a movie star but really wasn’t one. The observation stung him to the core.

That was all about to change—dramatically.

Seventy million people would watch Shogun a couple of weeks after we talked. That number exploded to 110 million when he starred in The Thorn Birds.

Today, the producers of what are now known as limited series, would give their eye teeth for a quarter of that kind of mass audience. As the New York Times pointed out in its assessment of Richard’s career, he became overnight “TV’s mega star.”

Reports came Sunday of his death in Hawaii at the age of ninety. Wonderful Prudence exited last year. I’m left with a warm memory of the three of us together at lunch, and me sitting there, unable to stop thinking, How does anyone get to look that good?