Adios, Richard Chamberlain

[Cage1]

I didn't watch much of his stuff, except I loved those Allan Quatermain movies when I was a kid. I'm certain they were objectively bad, but I was young enough to not care. And I'll never watch one today because I don't want to learn how bad they really are. But I loved them when they'd pop up on HBO.

Anyway, RIP to a legend.

 

[Mr. Blue Sky]

I’ll take ‘Celebrities i thought have been dead for 20 years, Alex’……








*seriously though, always sad to hear, godspeed RC

 

[GrandAdmiral]

I’ll take ‘Celebrities i thought have been dead for 20 years, Alex’……








*seriously though, always sad to hear, godspeed RC

Same

 

[Cage1]

I’ll take ‘Celebrities i thought have been dead for 20 years, Alex’……

Yes, also this.

 

[Zztop]

I knew he was still around because a few months ago I rewatched the Shogun miniseries from the 1980s. I wanted to see how it compared to the more recent one that just came out. After Shogun, I wondered what happened to him, so I googled it and he was living out in Hawaii

 

[soupcan dan]

the man in the iron mask, right?


thought he'd auto eroticized hisself to deathe a while back.

 

[Madmarsha]

the man in the iron mask, right?


thought he'd auto eroticized hisself to deathe a while back.

That was David Carradine.

ETA: Okay, here's what I found. Apparently in the '70s, he had an affair with Wesley Eure. Remember him? You do if you watched Saturday morning programming in the '70s. He was son Will Marshall on Land of the Lost. I always thought he was so cute (and, I guess, so did Richard). Anyway, he was born in Baton Rouge and grew up in Hattiesburg, MS for a number of years.

 

[Saintman2884]

I knew he was still around because a few months ago I rewatched the Shogun miniseries from the 1980s. I wanted to see how it compared to the more recent one that just came out. After Shogun, I wondered what happened to him, so I googled it and he was living out in Hawaii

The original Shogun miniseries featuring Chamberlain is actually a bit longer, feels more drawn-out, feels more melodramatic at times and actually isn't a closer adaptation to the original popular historical novel like last year's version was. And that novel itself was a fictionalized story based around real characters, events, settings and even battles from late Warring States period in the early 17th century and details how Tokogawa Shogunate finally ended a near-130 year long civil war and helped start a period of dynastic rule that would last until 1860's and 1868's Meiji Restoration (an event most Japanese historians and many Japanese today view as their 4th of July: the beginning of their country's modern period)

Shogun wasn't the only famous contemporary miniseries Chamberlain was in. He starred in the Allan Quartermain's movies (one of them in the early 80's featured a then-unknown, young Sharon Stone) but he also starred in the very popular, critically-acclaimed Thorn Birds.

Their were rumors about his sexuality going back as far as the early 80's and he didn't officially come out as gay until 2003. Not that someone's sexuality, much less a celebrity's is anyone else's business much less relevant to gossip magazines in entertainment circles. I'd say the last 10-15 years of his life was spent as a retired actor alongside Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, and Jack Nicholson.