Everyone Hated Ginger on ‘Gilligan’s Island’
Fans of Gilligan’s Island love to joke about the earliest version of the show’s theme song, which shouts out most of the cast before resorting to an “And the rest!” lyric to refer to the Professor and Mary Ann. In fact, it didn’t change until star Bob Denver lobbied for it to include everyone.
One cast member, however, would have preferred to keep it the original way — Tina Louise, the “Movie Star” who closed out the original version of the credits. “Part of Louise’s dissatisfaction with the series was that she had expected to be the star of the show,” according to a 1965 issue of TV Guide, as reported by MeTV.
TV Guide wasn’t much of a gossip rag but even the publication responsible for channel listings couldn’t ignore the bad blood between Louise and everyone else in the cast. Denver, who played Gilligan, “will not say why he and the glamorous Tina do not get along, nor will any of the castaways — they just ignore her, and she ignores them. Between scenes, while the other six principals chat and tell jokes together, she sits off by herself. And recently when Denver was asked to pose for pictures with her, he adamantly refused.”
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Cold-blooded! But Denver refused to talk specifics about Louise to anyone. The San Bernardino County Sun tried to get his side of the story, asking Denver “about the rumbles on Gilligan's Island, especially Bob’s problems with Tina Louise. It had been rumored for months that they were waging their own private Vietnam.”
The Gilligan actor took the high road, though it’s not hard to read between the lines. “When you’ve got a big cast like ours, there’s bound to be personality clashes. After all, you can’t like every human being you meet, even if you want to,” he said. “The best thing you can do is overlook someone’s problems. I don’t believe in using someone’s unprofessionalism to get my name in the papers.”
While Denver wouldn’t spill the dirt on his problems with Louise, Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann, was more accommodating. “Tina thought she was a movie star, and I don’t think she realized what it was that there were seven of us,” Wells told interviewer Kevin Renick. “She was never part of the company. Even since then I have tried to kind of contact her. And she doesn’t even want to admit she was in it.”
Louise didn’t get along any better with the show’s creative leads. “It was a little bit confusing in the beginning when John Rich was directing,” Louise said in The Unofficial Gilligan’s Island Handbook. “I had been told Ginger was a Marilyn Monroe/Lucille Ball character, and he sort of wanted to make it Eve Arden. And I didn’t want to go in that direction. So there was a difference of opinion.”
Conflict with the cast and crew is probably why Louise refused to participate in Gilligan made-for-TV movies and reunions. When the castaways were finally rescued in the 1970s, Judith Baldwin stepped in as Ginger Grant.
These days, Louise is the last living cast member of Gilligan's Island and finally acknowledges the show that made her a household name. In 2019, she told Closer Weekly that she was “happy to have been part of something that was so special to American television.”
Bob Denver would have loved to hear it.
