“I said, ‘I am willing to work with this director for free without a script. “I thought it was brilliant,” says Chamberlain. Then he watched Weir’s atmospheric, eerie “The Picnic at Hanging Rock” and he was sold. You didn’t want to fool around with him.”Īs for “The Last Wave,” Chamberlain had never heard of Weir and when he saw a draft of the script that he called “very underwritten,” he was worried. He’s unbelievably charming, but on set he … gets sort of dangerous. It’s like working with a dragon or a huge crocodile. Russell, he says, was brilliant “but kind of rough. That same year, he appeared opposite Glenda Jackson in the outrageous “Music Lovers.” But it worked out so well that the Hallmark Hall of Fame taped it in 1970. “It was an ordeal to come up to snuff in the play,” Chamberlain says. In 1969, he took on the role of “Hamlet” at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. “That’s how I started my training in England - it was on-the-job training,” he says. But as soon as he walked off the plane, his agent told him he was wanted for a six-hour BBC adaptation of “Portrait of a Lady.” He then headed to England in hopes of going to drama school there. It was in the middle of the flower children time and everybody was beautiful and kind of loaded.” “We were all living in houseboats in Sausalito. “We had night shoots in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco with Janis Joplin and everybody hanging out,” he says. He looks great on the outside, but there’s nothing inside.” “He said, ‘You are perfect for the part,’ ” Chamberlain remembers. Lester had some unusual words of encouragement for him. “Petulia,” directed by Richard Lester, was his first post-”Kildare” motion picture. Playwright-director Neil LaBute will discuss Chamberlain’s career with the actor on Saturday in between the screening of 1968’s “Petulia,” in which he plays Julie Christie’s abusive husband, and Ken Russell’s 1970 biopic on Tchaikovsky, “The Music Lovers.” Screening Friday is Peter Weir’s scary 1977 supernatural thriller “The Last Wave,” in which Chamberlain plays a lawyer hired to defend an aboriginal man accused of murder. It’s really wonderful.”Ĭhamberlain will be bringing his charm, good humor and delightful stories to the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre this weekend at a two-day movie tribute to the actor. It didn’t change a thing.” In fact, it’s given him a “great freedom. Though he feared what everyone would think, says Chamberlain, “Everybody was so wonderful. It was almost like an angel came into the room and put her hand on my head and said, ‘Enough of this nonsense.’ It’s the most benign, meaningless fact being gay. Kildare and numerous major miniseries, including Shogun and The Thorn Birds. “You absorb all of this negative stuff and it becomes a part of you. What was the film in which Richard Chamberlain starred Richard Chamberlain was born on March 31, 1934, in Los Angeles, California, and is an award-winning actor who is best known for his roles in the classic 1960s medical series Dr. “When you grew up gay in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, it was a terrible thing,” he says.
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