page_title: Dr. Kildare
section_title: Dr. Kildare (1960s)
hierarchical_section_title: Dr. Kildare / Television / Dr. Kildare (1960s)
caption_attribution_description: Publicity photo announcing the premiere of the television program Dr. Kildare. Raymond Massey is Dr. Gillespie and Richard Chamberlain is Dr. Kildare, shown scrubbing up.
context_page_description: Dr. James Kildare is a fictional American medical doctor, originally created in the 1930s by the author Frederick Schiller Faust under the pen name Max Brand. Shortly after the character's first appearance in a magazine story, Paramount Pictures used the story and character as the basis for the 1937 film Internes Can't Take Money, starring Joel McCrea as Jimmie Kildare. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsequently acquired the rights and featured Kildare as the primary character in a series of American theatrical films in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Several of these films were co-written by Faust, who also continued to write magazine stories and novels about the character until the early 1940s. Kildare was portrayed by Lew Ayres in nine MGM films. Later films set in the same hospital featured Dr. Gillespie. Ayres returned to voice the Kildare character in an early 1950s radio series. The 1961-1966 Dr. Kildare television series made a star of Richard Chamberlain and gave birth to a comic book and comic strip based on the show. A short-lived reboot of the TV series, Young Doctor Kildare, debuted in 1972 and ran for 24 episodes.
context_section_description: A second attempt at a television series was made in the early 1960s with Dr. Kildare, a NBC medical drama television series starring Richard Chamberlain in the title role,  produced by MGM Television and inspired by the original Dr. Kildare stories and films. Lew Ayres appeared as Dr. Gillespie in a 1960 unsold and unaired pilot (with Joseph Cronin as Kildare), but Raymond Massey was cast as Gillespie in the version that finally went to air. Premiering on September 28, 1961, the series was a top-10 hit with audiences and ran until April 5, 1966, for a total of 191 episodes in five seasons. The first two seasons told the story of Dr. James Kildare (Chamberlain), working in a fictional large metropolitan hospital while trying to learn his profession, deal with his patients' problems, and earn the respect of the senior Dr. Leonard Gillespie (Massey). In the third season, Dr. Kildare was promoted to resident and the series began to focus more on the stories of the patients and their families. The success of the show (along with ABC's contemporaneous medical drama Ben Casey) inspired the launch of numerous other television medical dramas in the ensuing years.
caption: Raymond Massey as Dr. Gillespie and Richard Chamberlain as Dr. Kildare, in the 1961 Dr. Kildare television series
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