Richard Chamberlain Looks Back on His Celebrated TV Career, Including Working With Barbara Stanwyck in ‘The Thorn Birds’

He became a worldwide heartthrob 63 years ago as the star of Dr. Kildare, one of television’s first medical dramas. But it was during the heyday of the miniseries in the 1980s that Richard Chamberlain became TV royalty, earning Emmy nominations and Golden Globe Awards for two epic historical sagas as well as the title “King of the Miniseries.” In 1980’s Shogun, Chamberlain played English navigator John Blackthorne, shipwrecked in 17th-century Japan, and three years later in The Thorn Birds, he starred as hot Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart, torn between Rachel Ward’s Meggie Cleary and his ecclesiastical vows.