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New York|For Tina Louise, Escape, Finally, From ‘Gilligan’s Island’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/nyregion/tina-louise-gilligans-island.html
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Ms. Louise would prefer to not to talk about Ginger, her breathy sitcom character from the 1960s. Luckily, to the children she tutors, she’s just Ms. Tina.
March 18, 2025, 11:04 a.m. ET
The green-eyed TV star with the beauty mark on her cheek shows up at a school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan every Wednesday. For an hour, Ms. Tina, as the students and teachers call her, devotes herself to a pair of 7-year-olds who are struggling with reading. They’ll go through whatever books the teacher gives her, like “All Aboard!” or “How to Catch a Witch.” When her time is up, she’ll head home.
None of the children will have any idea that Ginger from “Gilligan’s Island” — in real life, the actress Tina Louise — just spent the best 60 minutes of her week with them.
Ms. Louise does not like to talk about the television show that made her a household name. She has no desire to revisit the years between 1964 and 1967, when she was marooned with six oddballs and a trunk full of slinky, sequined gowns.
Through its run of 98 episodes, “Gilligan’s Island” was a prime-time success and became a Gen X touchstone in reruns. (The question of “Ginger or Mary Ann?” can still evoke passionate debate among men of a certain age.) As for Ms. Louise, she can barely utter the name of the program, referring to it as “G.I.” or “The Series.”
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It’s not that she regrets it, although she and the cast never received residuals. “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” she said in a recent conversation from her modest one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. She is the show’s last living cast member, and she recently celebrated a birthday she’d prefer not to discuss. (“I’m 29,” she said coyly.) She still has the signature beauty that made her famous, now on display in jeans and a black T-shirt instead of fancy gowns.
