Kildare as Hamlet

In the early 1960s, when he was MGM Television's Dr. Kildare, Richard Chamberlain got more fan mail than just about anyone on the lot since Clark Gable played Rhett Butler. In 1966, when the TV series ended. Chamberlain decided to start his career all over again.

He went to England, let his peroxided hair grow brown and long. He took speech lessons, and, after a strong performance in a BBC drama, received an offer to play Hamlet with the excellent Birmingham Repertory Theater. Recalls Chamberlain: "I felt pride, amazement, disbelief, terror." He was the first American to dare Hamlet in Britain since John Barrymore, and, premiere night, a full cry of London critics rode to Birmingham for the kill --and for a shock. Wrote the Times critic the next morning: "Anyone who comes to this production prepared to scoff at the sight of a popular American television actor playing Hamlet will be in for a deep disappointment."

That same gratifying surprise awaits NBC viewers next Tuesday when Hallmark Hall of Fame televises the Chamberlain Hamlet. It is an aristocratic, romantic and (he admits) "not scholarly" conception of the role. His Hamlet is passionate sometimes to the point of hysteria and Chamberlain's accents (well east of mid-Atlantic) are tinged with tremolo. Sir Michael Redgrave, an esteemed former Old Vic Hamlet who plays Polonius in this TV production, says that, overall, "Richard is very good--more than just interesting." To fit the two-hour time slot, however, more massive surgery has been performed on the Folio than any that Kildare ever did.

Chamberlain was not to the Shakespearean canon born. He grew up in Beverly Hills and, out of "sheer uncooperativeness," did not learn to read until the fourth grade. He eventually managed a B.A. from Pomona College, and, after some acting lessons, landed an MGM contract. The studio gave him the Kildare part after passing over 35 others (including Lew Ayres, who created the role in films). It did not, however, make an actor out of him, as Sir Cedric Hardwicke once told Chamberlain. "You're doing it all backwards. You're a star and you don't know how to act."

The change in direction was not easy. His Broadway bash, the musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's, closed before it opened. His films included one limited success as Julie Christie's sadistic husband in Petulia. The change of image and luck finally came with Hamlet. "I had been told that the English actors would eat me alive," he says, but he took strength from their patience and from the dictum of Margaret Leighton (his TV Gertrude) that rehearsals are the place to make a"bloody fool" of yourself. As he got deeper into the play, he discovered that "my own character was liberated, I was able to shout and cry--things I'd always been too self-conscious to do before."

At 35, Chamberlain still considers himself about ten years away "from really learning my trade." He has just finished two film parts, as Tchaikovsky in a romanticized biography and as Octavius in a remake of Julius Caesar. From his homes in London and Los Angeles (he is unmarried), Chamberlain is currently angling for stage work. If nothing else, he thinks he has at last kicked Kildare. "The umbilical cord that once bound us," he declares, "is cut."

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