Conversations with Richard Chamberlain.

Fans of actor Richard Chamberlain know him as handsome Dr. Kildare, courageous John Blackthorn in Shogun, tortured Father Ralph in The Thorn Birds, witty Professor Higgins in Broadway's My Fair Lady, aristocratic Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music, and any of dozens of characters he has portrayed in film, television and on Broadway. From Hamlet on the English stage to the Count of Monte Cristo on film, this international star has entered our living rooms and our hearts as one of the most popular and familiar figures in modern entertainment.

But on June 3, as the featured speaker in the Pacific Heritage Series at Hualalai, it was as if Chamberlain had invited residents and guests into his own private living room. In a presentation titled "Conversations with Richard Chamberlain: Making a Life in Hawai'i," the award-winning actor disarmed the audience with his warmth and candor as he discussed the qualities he values in life, and why he chose to live in Hawai'i. 

"I don't think it occurred to me, when I was young, that I would actually live on a beach," he began. "Growing up in L.A., going to the beach was the biggest thrill in the world." Years later, after graduating in art from Pomona College, where he excelled in drama, and serving in the U.S. Army, the "shy and inhibited" Chamberlain returned to L.A. and studied acting. His lead role in the TV miniseries Dr. Kildare launched his climb to fame. 

Even with a burgeoning career in the vaunted corridors of Hollywood, his fascination with the ocean pursued him. On his way back from filming a Peter Weir film, The Last Wave, in Australia, a friend who was a Hawai'i resident helped Chamberlain discover an oceanfront idyll in Ma'ili on O'ahu's Wai'anae coast. "It's the most beautiful spot," he said. "It has a huge waterfront and faces the Wai'anae mountains...It's a kama'aina (local) beach house. Simple. I saw the possibilities in this place and ended up buying it, for not a lot of money." After years of traveling between L.A. and Hawai'i, he said, he finally decided to move permanently to Hawai'i, and he has kept that house to this day.

"I'd come for a week or two and have to tear myself away," he recalled. "It kept getting harder to do. And finally I decided to stay."

Thus began his life in Hawai'i-on the beach.

Thirteen years ago, a television series, Island Son, gave Chamberlain the opportunity not only to live, but to work, in Hawai'i. He bought a mountaintop property on the slopes of O'ahu's Tantalus that once was a part of King David Kalakaua's private holdings. Many have described its Diamond Head view as peerless. 

"I thought, finally, that I would have a real life in Hawai'i," Chamberlain noted. His dream house was named Moanikeala-gentle morning mist-by a Hawaiian teacher named Hannah Veary.

"I met her early in my stay here, around 1979," Chamberlain recalled. "Everyone called her Nana. I remember her saying, very forcefully, 'I am not a kahuna' (master). But she was. She was a spiritual master, the most wonderful woman, full of life. And she had a magical way of combining the ancient traditions of the Hawaiians with what we might call Christian beliefs. She studied with Ernest Holmes, whom I knew as a child. He was an extraordinary teacher, healer and metaphysician. Nana had a remarkable way of combining these disciplines into a belief system that was all-inclusive, warm and full of love."

Nana Veary brought to life the traditional Hawaiian practices that Chamberlain had previously only read about. Among those practices is a supreme reverence for all forms of life, from rocks to flowers to clouds and the broader sweep of people and the environment. Chamberlain's own quiet activism is well known in environmental circles. He lobbied long and hard in California and Washington D.C. to save the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park. He also has narrated Audubon television specials on the environment, and a film called The Grand Canyon, Its History and Fragile Ecology. In 1989 he was the principal speaker at the San Francisco Ecological Convention, and throughout the late '80s was a volunteer in the Save Sandy Beach movement that led to the creation of Ka Iwi State Park on the south shore of O'ahu.

"It worries me sometimes that human beings want to cover every last stitch of nature with mini malls and fast food joints," he commented. "I have a theory: that we don't trust nature because we didn't make it and thus cannot control it. I have a feeling that on some unconscious level, a lot of us resent nature. 
We also have the urge to build things everywhere that we can control, that we understand-that we have dominion over.

"It's worth thinking about: our relationship to these fragile and extraordinary islands we live on."