Was Richard Chamberlain Ever Married? Inside Late Actor’s Relationship With Partner Martin Rabbett

Hollywood is mourning the loss of TV and film icon Richard Chamberlain after his death was announced on March 30, 2025, at age 90. Many took to social media to share their condolences after the actor’s longtime partner, Martin Rabbett, confirmed the news.

“Our beloved Richard is with the angels now,” Rabbett said in a statement to People.

“He is free and soaring to those loved ones before us. How blessed were we to have known such an amazing and loving soul. Love never dies. And our love is under his wings lifting him to his next great adventure,” he said.

Harlan Boll, a spokesman for the actor, told The New York Times that the actor died at “his home in Waimanalo, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu” from “complications of a stroke.”

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Richard Chamberlain Opened Up About His Love Life Before His Death

Chamberlain came out as gay in his 2003 memoir, Shattered Love. “I played a cat-and-mouse game with the press,” he said about keeping his love life private through the years before coming out.

“I had to be very careful and very circumspect,” the Dr. Kildare star told Fox News in December 2022. “Magazines did lots and lots of interviews, and they sort of suspected. They would ask me questions like, ‘When are you going to get married and have children?’ I would say, ‘Well, not quite yet. I’m awfully busy.’ I had to be careful for a long time.”

“It was inhibiting,” Chamberlain added. “But I got so used to it that it was just habitual to be sort of careful and on guard in certain situations. Yes, I would’ve been a happier person to be out and free and all that. But I already had so much to be happy about. I was a working actor, and that’s the main thing I wanted out of this lifetime.”

Was Richard Chamberlain Ever Married?

The late entertainer was never married. However, he was in a long-term relationship with Rabbett beginning in 1977.

A decade after coming out, Chamberlain spoke to The New York Times about his relationship with Rabbett and navigating his “hetero heartthrob” image at the beginning of his career.

“When you grow up in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s being gay, it not only ain’t easy, it’s just impossible. You cannot do it,” the Shōgun actor told the outlet.

He said that back then, “being gay was the worst thing you can possibly be. I assumed there was something terribly wrong with me. And even becoming famous and all that, it was still there.”

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Who Is Martin Rabbett?

Chamberlain revealed that he met Rabbett while they were “acting in a Tennessee Williams play.” Rabbett is a writer, actor and producer, whose credits include Island Son, Finite Water, The Bourne Identity, All the Winters That Have Been and Bare Essence. He appeared in Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold with Chamberlain in 1986.

Chamberlain told The New York Times in 2014 that at the time, he and Rabbett were no longer living together.

“We don’t live together anymore, and we’re much better friends than we’ve ever been,” Chamberlain said of their friendship. “So, I’m in the business of advising people who are married, etc., to get another house.”

However, in his obituary in The New York Times, Boll said that “before his death Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Rabbett had resumed living together in Hawaii.”