Bob Denver "Gilligan" Dies at Age 70

[308Mike]

As a kid, I LOVED that show, Gilligan's Island (ESPECIALLY Ginger and Mary Ann)!!!

‘Gilligan’ star Bob Denver dies at age 70
TV's favorite ‘little buddy’ had undergone bypass surgery this year


Reuters file
Actor Bob Denver, who portrayed character Gilligan in the comedy series "Gilligan's Island", died at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina, according to agent Mike Eisenstadt in a statement issued September 6.

LOS ANGELES — Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show “Gilligan’s Island,” made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, has died. He was 70.

Denver died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Denver, who for the past several years had lived in Princeton, W.Va., also underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier this year.

His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with him.

“He was my everything and I will love him forever,” Dreama Denver said in a statement.

An underrated comedian
Denver’s signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie in the “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.

Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word “work” was mentioned in his presence.

Gilligan on the other hand was industrious but inept. And his character was as lovable as he was inept. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Buster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. So did the skipper, who was played by Alan Hale Jr. and who always referred to his first mate affectionately as “little buddy.”

“I feel like a part of me is gone, too,” Hickman told The Associated Press. “We were a comedy team and I was proud to be his straight man. He was a wonderful comedian. Underrated, really.”

California state Sen. Sheila James Kuehl, who played Dobie’s love-struck pursuer, remembered Denver as a mentor, both in acting and life.

“What he taught me about acting was when you work to make the other person look good, you end up looking good yourself,” she said. “What he taught me about life was that you could love your work, but it was really more important to love your friends and family.”

“As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children’s lives,” Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, once said. “Gilligan is a buffoon that makes mistakes and I cannot tell you how many kids come up and say, ‘But you loved him anyway.”’

TV critics were less kind, dismissing the show about a group of tourists being stranded on an uncharted desert island as inane. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndicated reruns and reunion films, including 1981’s “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.” (It also led to the recent TBS reality series “The Real Gilligan’s Island.”)

One of the most recent films was 2001’s “Surviving Gilligan’s Island: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in History,” in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while three of the four surviving members, including Denver, narrated and reminisced.

He’ll always be Gilligan
After “Gilligan’s Island,” Denver went on to star in other TV series, including “The Good Guys” and “Dusty’s Trail,” as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows.

But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of his top 10 lists — “the top 10 things that will make you stand up and cheer” — “Late Show” host David Letterman once simply shouted out Denver’s name to raucous applause.

“It was the mid-’70s when I realized it wasn’t going off the air,” Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking the Web site eBay each day to keep up on the prices “Gilligan” memorabilia were fetching.

“I certainly didn’t set out to have a series rerun forever, but it’s not a bad experience at all,” he added.

The show’s success, according to its creator, Sherwood Schwartz, was rooted in the fact that people of entirely different backgrounds were thrown together each week in a comedic setting.

“I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications,” Schwartz said.

Besides Hale’s skipper and Wells’ young farm-girl tourist, the other castaways were Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer, as rich snobs Thurston and Lovey Howell; Tina Louise, as movie star Ginger Grant; and Russell Johnson, as science professor Roy Hinkley Jr.

Denver’s death leaves Wells, Johnson and Louise as the cast’s surviving members.

Denver was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Jan 9, 1935. He discovered acting while studying law at Loyola University in Los Angeles in the 1950s. While struggling to make it as an actor, he taught private school and worked for a time at a post office.

After landing a small role in the 1959 Sal Mineo film “A Private Affair,” he was cast as Krebs in “Dobie Gillis” and his career took off.

Denver is survived by his wife and children and a granddaughter, Elana. The family said no memorial service is planned.

[Aesop]

Um, he died like 8 years ago.

Left out in the speak-no-ill-of-the-dead obit is the fact that from about 1968-2000, Denver was pretty well ensconced in a haze of bong smoke, and that neither the Krebs nor Gilligan characters were much of an acting stretch for him. Nor that while Schwartz's royalties continue to the estate to the current day, Denver and his co-stars' residual gravy train ended after the second or third set of re-runs around 1969, IIRC the details of the SAG/AFTRA contracts negotiated in the late '60s. But to be sure, Denver was unoffensive and generally harmless guy who never went out of his way to offend people. He was built pretty well for the late 1950s, and I think the combination of success and the 1960s overloaded his coping skills as the world became a very confusing place. And he probably made a much better mark on the world playing a shiftless beatnik or a bumbling castaway than he ever would have done graduating Loyola law school and becoming a shiftless lawyer or a bumbling superior court judge.

[Jericho941]

Yup.

updated 9/6/2005 6:16:30 PM ET

[308Mike]

Yup.

updated 9/6/2005 6:16:30 PM ET

Where are you seeing the date? I get nothing for the date, although that is probably due to my script blocking plug-in, and their ancient reporting of extremely OLD information!!

I mean, WHY would they report something almost a DECADE old???? I wouldn't be surprised at the other news stations, but coming from Fox, it surprises me (unless someone was passing a joke by their editor).

If it's that old, I apologize for posting something so out-of-date. They got me!!! ARGH!!!!!!!!!

[Jered]

[Aesop]

Offhand, I'd say you were Googling political stories on Fearless Leader, and the algorithms simply linked to the next-highest-rated jug-eared dope-smoking jackass on the entire Internet by default.

[Greg]

Offhand, I'd say you were Googling political stories on Fearless Leader, and the algorithms simply linked to the next-highest-rated jug-eared dope-smoking jackass on the entire Internet by default.

Not to say anything bad about the actor, who was apparently a nice guy.... but I could never stand Gilligan.

Reminds me of something I read once, forgive me if I don't remember it exactly right....

"We are all trapped on our own Island, and to escape we must each kill our own Gilligan."

[Weetabix]

Offhand, I'd say you were Googling political stories on Fearless Leader, and the algorithms simply linked to the next-highest-rated jug-eared dope-smoking jackass on the entire Internet by default.

Aesop for the win.

[308Mike]

Offhand, I'd say you were Googling political stories on Fearless Leader, and the algorithms simply linked to the next-highest-rated jug-eared dope-smoking jackass on the entire Internet by default.

Aesop for the win.

I'm not getting the date of the article, it just says: "updated"

Gilligan Died.jpg

[Jericho941]

Weird. What web browser are you using?