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    Richard Chamberlain, Actor in ‘Shogun’ and ‘Dr. Kildare,’ Dies at 90

    An overnight star as Dr. Kildare in the 1960s, he achieved new acclaim two decades later as the omnipresent leading man of mini-series.Richard Chamberlain, who rose to fame as the heartthrob star of the television series “Dr. Kildare” in the early 1960s, proved his mettle by becoming a serious stage actor and went on to a new wave of acclaim as the omnipresent leading man of 1980s mini-series, died on Saturday night at his home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. He was 90.A spokesman, Harlan Boll, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Mr. Chamberlain was just 27 when he made his debut in the title role of the idealistic young intern on NBC’s “Dr. Kildare,” based on the 1930s and ’40s movie series. With his California-blond boyish good looks and low-key charm, he became an overnight star, said to be receiving 12,000 fan letters a week during the show’s five-year run (1961-66).Not long after the series ended, he moved to England, determined to shake his pretty-boy image by training as a serious actor. By 1969 he was playing Hamlet at the Birmingham Repertory Theater and surprising the British critics, who called him assured, graceful and plucky. “Anyone who comes to this production to scoff at the sight of a popular American television actor, Richard Chamberlain, playing Hamlet will be in for a deep disappointment,” a review in The Times of London declared.After five years he returned to the United States and to notable stage and screen roles, but it was television, and in particular the mini-series format, that restored his major star status. It began with a role as a Scottish trapper in the ensemble cast of the 12-part “Centennial” in 1978, as viewers began a brief but intense romance with this new programming form, which combined feature-film ambition with the many hours required to tell big stories in great detail.For Mr. Chamberlain, the phenomenon hit full force only when he played the dashing 17th-century romantic lead in “Shogun” in 1980, seducing a new generation of fans. He followed that in 1983 with his portrayal of Ralph de Bricassart, the tortured young priest in the saga “The Thorn Birds,” making him a 49-year-old sex symbol and the undeniable holder of the unofficial title “king of the mini-series.”Mr. Chamberlain received Emmy Award nominations for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” as well as for “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story” (1985) — in which he played Raoul Wallenberg, the World War II resistance hero — and for “The Count of Monte Cristo” (1975). He won three Golden Globes during his career, for “The Thorn Birds” and “Shogun,” and as best television actor for “Dr. Kildare” in 1963.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Television

    Richard Chamberlain Was a Mega Star in TV Mini-Series ‘The Thorn Birds’ and ‘Shogun’

    The actor, who died at 90, was the most compelling face of a maximalist, soapy television era.When mini-series ruled prime time, their maxi-est star was Richard Chamberlain.Today we call them “limited series.” But in their 20th-century heyday, under another inapt diminutive, mini-series were the megafauna of TV, lavish events that achieved the kind of cinematic spectacle that was otherwise rare in living-room entertainment of the time. They were TV specials that made TV special.In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of mini-series — “Roots,” “The Winds of War,” “Lonesome Dove” — dominated the conversation and minted stars. But perhaps no other actor is more closely associated with the genre than Chamberlain, who died on Saturday at 90, because of his star-making, swoon-worthy, emotive roles in “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds.”I was young when Chamberlain’s mini-series aired, and “Dr. Kildare,” the 1960s medical series that established him as a heartthrob, was before my time. But his landmark roles helped form my ideas of what TV could do, and what a TV star was.His mini-series were luxury liners and time machines, whisking audiences to other lands and ages in a way that workaday series couldn’t. In “Shogun,” Chamberlain played John Blackthorne, an English navigator taken prisoner in feudal Japan; in the melodrama “The Thorn Birds,” his priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart, wrestled with his forbidden love for a young woman from an Australian sheep ranching family.Locations and budgets helped shape the experience, of course, but so did Chamberlain’s screen presence. A Shakespearean actor in between TV roles, he was able to make the manners of decades or centuries before feel warm-blooded and lived-in. He was dignified enough to carry the stories’ grandeur, expressive enough to put them over as the finest grade of pulp.Though he was a signature star of the 1980s, Chamberlain’s appeal was in a way a holdover of the 1960s and 1970s. He was emotive, with fine features that made a beautiful canvas for fervor and anguish and longing. He could rage and burst with passion, but his appeal was a different mold from the kind of beefy masculinity that would define the 1980s screen celebrity of Stallone and Schwarzenegger.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘S.N.L’: Live From New York, It’s More Military Secrets.

    Mikey Madison hosts and Luigi Mangione, Squidward and Ashton Hall make appearances.There was no uncertainty as to whether “Saturday Night Live” would offer its own satirical take on the news that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had disclosed attack plans for a U.S. strike on Houthi militia fighters in Yemen during a text chat that mistakenly included the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. It was only a question of how “S.N.L.” would do it.This weekend’s opening sketch featured the cast members Ego Nwodim and Sarah Sherman, as well as the guest host, Mikey Madison, as teenage girls whose group chat was interrupted by an unexpected message, read aloud by Andrew Dismukes: “FYI: Green light on Yemen raid!” he exclaimed.Dismukes, as Hegseth, continued to recite the texts he was sending (“Tomahawks airborne 15 minutes ago”) along with the emojis he was using for punctuation (“Flag emoji, fire emoji, eggplant”).“Do we know you, bro?” Madison asked. “This is Jennabelle.”“Oh, nice,” Dismukes replied. “Jennabelle from Defense, right?”Warned by Nwodim that he was in the wrong group text, Dismukes answered, “LOLOLOL could you imagine if that actually happened? Homer disappear into bush GIF.” He added that he was “sending a PDF with updated locations of all our nuclear submarines.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Maryland’s Kermit the Frog Commencement Choice Gets Mixed Reaction From Students

    The University of Maryland says it is honoring Jim Henson, an alumnus, with its choice of commencement speaker. Some students think it is avoiding “real issues.”Andrew Thompson, a senior at the University of Maryland, woke up on Wednesday to the news that his commencement speaker would not be a politician, tech executive or astronaut.Rather, he would be sent off into the work force by a cheery, fleece puppet the color of pea shoots: the “Muppet Show” star Kermit the Frog.That was great news for some students, who have already started calling the May graduation ceremony their “Ker-mencement.” Still, Mr. Thompson said that he and his roommates felt deflated. He didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but he couldn’t see why he was supposed to listen to life advice from a fictional character.“It’s a little silly, having a puppet as a commencement speaker,” said Mr. Thompson, 22, a mechanical engineering major.Perhaps silly was the point. Last spring, school after school struggled to keep their commencements from careening into controversial territory. The University of Southern California and Columbia University canceled their main-stage graduation ceremonies amid campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. An N.F.L. kicker dived into gender politics in a speech at Benedictine College in Kansas. And a university in Buffalo, N.Y., outsourced its commencement speech to an A.I. robot named Sophia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 3, Episode 8 Recap: ‘Eat It’

    A familiar face comes back into the picture, but it’s a face with a different name. And questionable motives.Season 3, Episode 8: ‘A Normal, Boring Life’This week, we tackle what the question of a “normal” life looks like for a Yellowjacket. Meet Adult Melissa, otherwise known as Kelly, played by Hilary Swank.Adult Melissa thinks she has it pretty good. How did she achieve this? First, she faked her own death and changed her name. Then she married Hannah’s daughter, whom she ended up falling in love with despite initially semi-stalking her to make sure she was safe. Now, they have a kid, go to church and live in a house with a cheesy sign that says, “The Kitchen Is the Heart of the Family.” She still likes to wear backward baseball caps.Melissa-slash-Kelly believes that she is pretty well-adjusted despite it all, and compared to Shauna, who broke into her home to kill her wife, she certainly seems to be. In order to move forward, Melissa erased the past, started completely fresh. And when the past came back to haunt her, she decided to exorcise it again. That’s why she sent the tape to Shauna after she learned about Adult Natalie’s death. It wasn’t, she says, a threat. It was a way to absolve herself, to keep the guilt at bay.Shauna doesn’t necessarily believe that, and I’m not sure I do either. Melissa is almost a little too at ease with her transformation. But sitting across the table from each other, these former lovers seem like polar opposites. Shauna is jittery and paranoid, constantly thinking someone is out to get her; Melissa is calm, just wanting to maintain the peaceful existence she fought hard to create for herself.Their dynamic in the present day is mirrored by the fracture we see in the ’90s story line this episode. With the arrival of Hannah and Kodiak, some of the Yellowjackets are thrilled to be heading home, dreaming of the “normal” lives they’ll have when they get back to civilization. Meanwhile, another camp is, perhaps rightly, unsure that normalcy will ever be an option.All of this is brought into stark relief during a sequence set to Supergrass’s “Alright,” which has the jaunty lyrics “We are young, we run green, keep our teeth nice and clean.” (You might know it best from the “Clueless” soundtrack.) As the song plays, we see how some of the girls fantasize about the creature comforts they’ve been missing. Mari’s water bottle turns into a Slurpee. Misty imagines sitting on a toilet and using real toilet paper. Van falls into a fluffy bed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    in Theater

    12 Plays and Musicals to Brighten the Spring

    On stages across the country, there is no shortage of adventurous work, including plays by Lauren Yee, Larissa FastHorse and Zora Howard.Variety, ambition and ingenuity are on generous display at theaters throughout the United States this spring, with a healthy crop of new shows, a lauded Kinks musical making its North American debut and one friend of Paddington starring in a Chekhov play. These dozen productions are worth putting on your radar.‘Here There Are Blueberries’A cache of photos of Nazis who built and ran the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II is the starting point for this historically inspired production from Tectonic Theater Project (“The Laramie Project”). A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize, it feels like a companion piece to the film “The Zone of Interest,” fixing its gaze on perpetrators of the Holocaust. As a museum archivist in the play says, “Six million people didn’t murder themselves.” Moisés Kaufman directs. (Through March 30, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, Calif. April 5-May 11, Berkeley Repertory Theater, Berkeley, Calif.)‘Mother Russia’This savvy goofball comedy by Lauren Yee (“Cambodian Rock Band”) is set in 1992 in St. Petersburg, where college friends Evgeny and Dmitri are bumblers at 25, perplexed and adrift in a new economy that their Soviet upbringing did nothing to prepare them for. So Evgeny, the son of a former high-ranking K.G.B. official, and Dmitri, who had always hoped to join the agency, mimic the old ways, spying for a client on a defector who has returned. Nicholas C. Avila directs the world premiere. (Through April 13, Seattle Rep.)‘Sunny Afternoon’Kinks fans on this side of the Atlantic at last get their chance at a jukebox musical about the band. With original story, music and lyrics by Ray Davies, and a book by Joe Penhall (“The Constituent”), this retelling of the Kinks’ rise won the Olivier Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Tony) for best new musical in 2015. Edward Hall, who staged that production, directs this one, too. Songs include “You Really Got Me,” “Lola” and more. (Through April 27, Chicago Shakespeare Theater.)‘Uncle Vanya’The title role in Chekhov’s lately omnipresent comic drama seems almost tailor-made for Hugh Bonneville (“Downton Abbey”), who has often played hapless beta men to perfection; think Mr. Brown in the “Paddington” movies or Bernie in “Notting Hill.” In Simon Godwin’s production of Conor McPherson’s adaptation, Bonneville plays a man waking up to the waste of having toiled all his life for the benefit of his celebrated brother-in-law (Tom Nelis), while building nothing for himself. With John Benjamin Hickey as Astrov, the tree-hugging doctor. (March 30-April 20, Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, D.C.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway

    Rudin stepped away from show business four years ago amid reports that he had bullied assistants. He says he has “a lot more self-control” now.Scott Rudin, the powerful producer who was exiled from Broadway and Hollywood four years ago after allegations of bullying led to widespread denunciations and even protesters in the streets, has been quietly preparing to return to show business.After what he called “a decent amount of therapy,” apologies to many people and a period of reading and reflection holed up on Long Island, Rudin said that he had decided he wanted to make theater again. He is at peace, he said, with the reality that not everyone is likely to welcome him back.He called his previous behavior, particularly toward subordinates, “bone-headed” and “narcissistic.” He acknowledged that he had long yelled at his assistants (“Yes, of course”) and that he had on occasion thrown things at people (“Very, very rarely”).“I was just too rough on people,” he said.But Rudin — who produced films including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network” and Broadway shows including “The Book of Mormon” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” — said he was confident that from now on he would be able to maintain his exacting standards without terrorizing others.“I have a lot more self-control than I had four years ago,” he said. “I learned I don’t matter that much, and I think that’s very healthy.” Also, he added, “I don’t want to let anybody down. Not just myself. My husband, my family and collaborators.”Rudin, 66, agreed to discuss his ambitious plans in response to requests to talk about indications that he was planning to return to producing. The result was his first detailed interview about his downfall, his time away from Broadway and his hopes to mount a comeback. His return is likely to be controversial, given that reports of the ways in which he berated and mistreated assistants helped lead to a reconsideration of workplace culture in theater.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Through Tears, ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Makes Them Laugh

    On an evening in mid-January, there were bouquets piled outside of Linda Lavin’s trailer on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. Nearby, on a soundstage, a black ribbon was wrapped around her caricature.Lavin had died on Dec. 29, at age 87. Now the creators and cast of “Mid-Century Modern,” a Hulu sitcom that shoots in front of a live studio audience, had returned to work to honor her. That night, they would film a half-hour episode designed to pay tribute to her character, Sibyl Schneiderman, while also eulogizing an actress with an outstanding seven-decade career.That was hard enough. Even harder: They had to make it funny.“The job is to make sure it doesn’t get too sad and too sentimental,” said James Burrows, the multicamera-sitcom legend who directed the episode. “You have to remember it’s a comedy, and you’ve got to make the audience laugh.”I had reached out to the sitcom’s creators back in the fall. A new sitcom set among gay men in later life — think “Golden Girls” for the marriage equality set — it sounded like a hoot. It also offered a chance to explore how depictions of queer relationships have changed since the 1990s.But when Lavin died unexpectedly after most of the season had been shot, an irreverent sitcom with an impressive zingers-per-minute rate suddenly had to pivot. So the reporting assignment pivoted, too. (All 10 episodes arrived on Friday.)The ensemble of “Mid-Century Modern” played a group of gay men living in Palm Springs, Calif., with the mother of Lane’s character, played by Lavin.Chris Haston/DisneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More