Richard Chamberlain, Dr. Kildare and The Thorn Birds Star, Dies at 90: ‘An Amazing and Loving Soul’

Richard Chamberlain, a movie and TV heartthrob known for his various roles, has died. He was 90.

The actor died on Saturday, March 29, at 11:15 p.m. local time in Waimanalo, Hawaii, of complications following a stroke, a friend of Chamberlain’s working on behalf of his retired publicist tells PEOPLE.

“Our beloved Richard is with the angels now,” Martin Rabbett, Chamberlain’s longtime partner, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.

“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,” continued Rabbett.

Services have yet to be announced. In lieu of flowers, Rabbett is asking that donations instead be made in Chamberlain’s name to either NPR or the Hawaii Humane Society.

Chamberlain rose to prominence in the 1960s, thanks to his starring role on the NBC medical drama Dr. Kildare. Later, he became known for his work in miniseries like Shōgun and The Thorn Birds. In 2003, he came out as gay.

Chamberlain was born George Richard Chamberlain in Los Angeles in 1934. He first started doing theater at Pomona College, and after serving in the U.S. Army for two years in Korea, he began acting professionally.

He scored a few bit parts on TV before he was cast on Dr. Kildare at age 26. It became a major hit when it premiered in 1961, launching him to stardom. The network was flooded with fan mail as a new heartthrob was born.

After the show wrapped, he joined a musical production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with Mary Tyler Moore — which closed in previews. “Up until then I had never known anything but miraculous success,” Chamberlain told PEOPLE in 1980.

So he headed to England to train harder as an actor, and ended up starring in the 1968 BBC miniseries The Portrait of a Lady, based on the Henry James novel. He also played Hamlet in England — extremely rare for an American actor — and continued to work in movies and TV films, buoyed by his new training and experience.

During the ’70s, he appeared in movies like The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974) before achieving major TV breakthroughs with 1978’s Centennial (which earned him a Golden Globe nomination) and 1980’s Shōgun, a historical miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel of the same name. It was filmed entirely on location in Japan. The critically acclaimed production won the Emmy for outstanding limited series and a Peabody award; Chamberlain was nominated for an Emmy and took home a Golden Globe for his work in the miniseries.

Chamberlain continued to find success in the miniseries genre, with hits like The Thorn Birds, Wallenberg, Dream West and The Bourne Identity (in which he played the first screen version of the spy Jason Bourne). In all, he was nominated for an Emmy four times but never won. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2000.

Because of his success in the form, The New York Times dubbed him “king of the miniseries” and “Robert Redford of the living room” in 1988.

Chamberlain compared making a miniseries to doing a Shakespeare play. “To speak Shakespeare, you have to sustain huge arcs of poetry. It’s a very special knack to keep the ideas clear through a whole soliloquy with qualifying asides and pick up the line again,” he told the outlet. “A 10-hour mini-series is similar. You must keep the overall design in your mind while shooting totally out of sequence.”

Chamberlain came out as gay in his 2003 memoir Shattered Love. “I had to be very careful and very circumspect,” he told Fox News in 2022 about staying in the closet while playing a romantic leading man in Hollywood. “Magazines did lots and lots of interviews, and they sort of suspected. They would ask me questions like, ‘When are you going to get married and have children?’”

But looking back, he said, “Yes, I would’ve been a happier person to be out and free and all that. But I already had so much to be happy about. I was a working actor, and that’s the main thing I wanted out of this lifetime.”

“When you grow up in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, being gay, it not only ain’t easy, it’s just impossible,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “You cannot do it. . . .  I assumed there was something terribly wrong with me. And even becoming famous and all that, it was still there.”

Chamberlain briefly dated actor Wesley Eure in the 1970s. He was in a relationship with actor Martin Rabbett from 1977 to 2010, when they amicably split and remained close friends.

Chamberlain was also a frequent presence on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic. He appeared on Broadway many times, including in 1990s revivals of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. He also continued to make TV appearances, including a recurring role on Brothers & Sisters. In 1962, he released an album, Richard Chamberlain Sings, which produced several hit singles in the U.S. and U.K.