Did Gilligan rat out Mary Ann decades after they got off the island? From legal troubles to serious
illnesses and professional struggles, these are the tragic tales of the Gilligan's Island cast.
Russell Johnson already had a fairly long resume before he was cast as Roy Hinkley,
aka the Professor, on Gilligan's Island. But the Pennsylvania native
wasn't always headed to Hollywood. His father died when he was eight,
and his mother was then forced to send him to a local orphanage, where he stayed through
high school. By the time he graduated, there was really only one option: serving in World War II.
Johnson ended up going to radio and mechanic school and then became part of a B-25 bomber
crew that flew 44 missions. He was awarded a slew of medals and citations, including a Purple Heart,
which is given to those killed or wounded in combat. During a mission in the Philippines,
his crew was sent to bomb a Japanese airstrip from a height of just 100
feet. They ended up in the ocean, and their radio operator was killed.
Johnson was among those saved by the Army's Sea Rescue group,
and he was transferred to a New Guinea military hospital. He'd broken both of
his ankles. During a 2007 interview with the Times Leader, he modestly recalled,
"We were just like everybody else — just doing our
job. We are just fortunate enough to be here today."
There was supposedly an intense rivalry between the actresses who played Ginger
the movie star and Mary Ann the farm girl. But according to the women themselves,
that's pretty far from the truth. As Tina Louise, who played Ginger, told the New York Post in 2020,
"Dawn [Wells] was a very wonderful person. I want
people to remember her as someone who always had a smile on her face."
"Young men all over the country began asking each other, 'Ginger or Mary Ann?'"
And when Wells talked with Closer Weekly in 2019 a year before passing away, she had nothing but
positive things to say about her co-star. As far as she was concerned, the more experienced Louise
taught her everything she needed to know. Still, there was one dark cloud. As Wells reflected,
"I don't think she was told the truth about the show when she was hired."
Louise seemingly walked into the show believing that she would be the main
character. Once she found out that she was more accurately just one part of an ensemble cast,
she nearly quit. Ultimately, a new writer-director was tasked with handling the character of Ginger,
and it left Louise conflicted. She insisted to the Post that she loved her character,
though she declined to appear in spinoffs and revivals.
On Gilligan's Island, Jim Backus played Thurston Howell III,
the millionaire who found himself in a situation that no amount of money could
fix. When he passed away in 1989, it was revealed that he'd been sick for a while.
The official cause of death was pneumonia, but Backus had also been diagnosed with Parkinson's
years earlier. When some of the Gilligan's Island cast attended a 70th birthday party
for creator Sherwood Schwartz in 1986, Backus had to be carried up the stairs.
He spoke about his illness in 1984 to the Petaluma Argus-Courier, revealing that
his symptoms started with lightheadedness, dizziness, and fainting. He also admitted,
"To me, the physical problems were very real and still are. There is no accurate
evaluation of what I have. I haven't been out of this house in almost six
years [...] It’s a matter of mind over matter and I'm determined to get well."
Long before Natalie Schafer played Lovey Howell, the millionaire's wife,
she had a seriously impressive career on Broadway and then later in film.
She had no immediate survivors when she passed away at the age of 90 in 1991.
"Leave the diamond mine to Gilligan!"
"Oh, I thought of Ginger for the diamond mine. She has such a lovely throat."
"Yes, yes, all right."
Schafer had once been engaged to a fellow actor named Charles
Butterworth. He broke out on the New York stage, and then it was on to Hollywood,
before his time was cut short by a premature death on June 14, 1946. He left a Hollywood nightclub,
got into his car, and started driving, before ending up in a single-car crash.
Schafer had previously been married to the actor Louis Calhern. They'd already been
divorced more than a decade earlier by the time he died in 1956. He'd been on the set
of what would have been his 69th film when he suffered a massive, fatal heart attack.
A parent's worst nightmare is the death of a child, and in 1994, that fate sadly befell
Russell Johnson. He and his third wife Constance married in 1982, and they remained together until
his death in 2014. Twenty years earlier in 1994, his son David died when he was only 39.
The official cause of death was complications from AIDS, with David passing eight years after
he lost his partner to the same disease. David was also Los Angeles's first AIDS coordinator,
and his father stepped up to do some amazing work in his memory.
Russell Johnson became an AIDS activist himself, raising awareness and much-needed
funds to benefit a series of charities. Much of his later years were spent doing what he
could to make sure other parents didn't have to suffer the same loss that he did.
In 2012, Dawn Wells told the Huffington Post,
"Our producer [Sherwood Schwartz] made $90 million
on the reruns of Gilligan's Island alone, but we didn't get any of it."
However, Sherwood's daughter Hope has called that number "ridiculous." Wells
has also claimed that she made $700 a week. She was new to the industry and
stressed that more experienced actors got paid more, to the tune of $750 per week.
Wells wasn't the only one who spoke out about a lack of compensation. Russell Johnson, for one,
was always resentful about how he and his co-stars didn't get a cut of the syndication profits. And
Tina Louise confirmed to The Wall Street Journal in 2014 that the cast got nothing in the form
of residuals or syndication fees. But she at least had moved on from it, as she admitted,
"Money's never been my God."
But others have endured serious financial struggles, including Wells, who was the
recipient of nearly $200,000 in donations via GoFundMe after a 2-month hospital stay in 2018.
"You know, if you don't have a family or a husband,
or anybody that's got a bankroll for you, it's very expensive."
Being on a hugely successful show is great, but it can also lead to typecasting. Before
Gilligan's Island, Russell Johnson was in dozens of movies and scores of TV shows in
various genres. It reportedly took him years to come to terms with the fact
that he was and always would be The Professor, and that was pretty much all there was to it.
Bob Denver was also typecast, although kind of ironically so. Before he was Gilligan,
he was the cool-guy sidekick on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,
and he was so associated with that character that he almost wasn't cast
in his most iconic role. But once he took to the high seas, though,
most of his roles afterwards were as Gilligan, either on spinoffs, cartoons, or guest spots.
And Jim Backus had his own struggles with typecasting, but well before Gilligan's
Island. Although he's well-known as The Millionaire more than anything else now,
for years he was only known as the voice of nearsighted cartoon character Mr. Magoo.
"Great balls of fire! Look at this rain. A solid sheet of water."
Bob Denver's later years were filled with multiple struggles. His wife Dreama published
a memoir in 2012 called Gilligan's Dreams: The Other Side of the Island, in which she described
serious financial difficulties due to a lack of residuals. It was hard for them to launch their
organization The Denver Foundation, which supports individuals with special needs, and Denver also
had trouble providing for his family. As Dreama explained to Cancer Today, he was
never paid more than $1,500 per week, and once an episode had aired twice, there was no more money.
In 1984, the Denvers welcomed their son Colin. He was diagnosed with severe autism
and a seizure disorder. He required around-the-clock specialized care,
which wasn't exactly cheap. As Dreama told Cancer Today in 2014,
"When money was tight, Bob would go do personal appearances and that would give
us enough to tide us over [...] We lived hand-to-mouth for a lot of our marriage."
According to Dreama, it always haunted her husband that he hadn't held out for
a better deal that would have improved their financial standing in later years. Nevertheless,
they made the best of it. As she told Fox News in 2016,
"We struggled financially, physically, emotionally like anybody else, and sometimes I think it really
helps folks to know that celebrities are not immune to the challenges of life."
In 1998, Bob Denver found drug enforcement agents knocking on his door. They'd intercepted a package
delivered to him that contained 35 grams of marijuana. He was arrested and later released
on bond. Denver was in West Virginia, and shortly after the news broke, a local TV station aired a
story claiming that an anonymous source had come forward to say that the package was
linked to his old co-star, Dawn Wells.That claim has never been confirmed; in fact,
it's been adamantly denied by Wells's publicist. But in 2007, she faced her own legal problems.
Wells was in Idaho at the time, driving home from a surprise birthday party when she was
pulled over by sheriffs who testified that they witnessed unsafe driving. She
failed a field sobriety test and was taken into police custody. Meanwhile,
she claimed she had given a ride to some hitchhikers when they decided to light up.
Four half-smoked joints were discovered in her car, along with paraphernalia.
"It was all those coconuts on the, on the island! Actually, it's really very depressing.
It's embarrassed me and hurt my feelings, and I've lost several jobs because of it."
When Dreama Denver released her memoir,
she was incredibly candid about her life with her husband Bob,
as she revealed that their relationship almost didn't survive. As she explained to Fox News,
"I didn't think of him as an alcoholic, but he drank way too much, and that was a battle.
Maybe it was alcoholism. Bob was a shy person and for him to have public adulation was odd."
Denver had another vice: smoking. Often going through a pack of cigarettes a day,
it was the combination of smoking and drinking that was later blamed for the
development of his stage IV hypopharyngeal cancer. This is a type of cancer that forms
in the lower part of the throat, larynx, tongue, thyroid gland, and lower jaw.
Denver underwent surgery to remove a tumor, and although he survived the operation,
post-op tests revealed that there was still cancer in his body. With
his chronic poor health a factor in limiting treatment options,
it was decided that he wasn't strong enough for chemotherapy. Four months after his diagnosis,
it was already clear that he wouldn't survive. He passed away on September 2, 2005 at the age of 70.
When the New York Post interviewed Tina Louise in 2020, she was speaking as the last surviving
cast member of Gilligan's Island. The interview came on the heels of the death of Dawn Wells,
who passed away on December 30, 2020 at the age of 82, from complications related to COVID-19.
Back in 2014, Russell Johnson had passed away at the age of 89 from kidney failure,
and Bob Denver had died nine years earlier in 2005, which came in the midst of his cancer
treatment and following a quadruple bypass. The millionaire's wife, meanwhile, passed away in
1991. Natalie Schafer was 90 when she succumbed to liver cancer on April 10 of that year.
And Alan Hale Jr. was 68 at the time of his passing on January 2, 1990,
from cancer of the thymus. As for Jim Backus, he was 76 when he died of pneumonia on July 3,
1989, after living with Parkinson's. His obituary in The New York Times ended with a
comment he'd made about Gilligan's Island and its lasting impact, as he declared,
"The critics assassinated it, but the kids flipped
for it. I've been watching the reruns, and confess I'm hooked on it myself."