WHOLESOME CASTAWAY MARY ANN ON ‘GILLIGAN’S ISLAND’ SITCOM
Dawn Wells, an actress best known as the pigtailed Kansas farm girl turned castaway on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island,” died Wednesday at an assistedliving facility in Woodland Hills. She was 82.
The cause was complications from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, said a spokesman, Harlan Boll.
A drama major who was crowned Miss Nevada in 1959, Wells parlayed her pageant success into a showbusiness career. She made scores of screen and stage appearances over five decades, but none as memorable as her role as Mary Ann on the CBS show about a group of tour-boat passengers marooned on an uncharted island.
“Gilligan’s Island,” which aired from 1964 to 1967, claimed an enduring place — as inexplicable as it was irrefutable — in pop culture. The show was dismissed by reviewers and even some network executives as escapist filler on the TV schedule. But it became one of the most popular programs ever in reruns, spawning occasional TV movies that reunited most of the original cast.
Every week, viewers followed the misadventures of the goofy first mate Gilligan (Bob Denver) and his buffoonish Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.); the haughty millionaire couple Thurston and Lovey Howell (Jim Backus and Natalie Schafer); a scientist
known as the Professor (Russell Johnson); a sultry movie star named Ginger (Tina Louise); and Mary Ann Summers, the girl-nextdoor whose wardrobe of choice was short shorts and midriff tops.
“It’s not my ego talking, but Mary Ann wasn’t just a silly and sweet ingenue,” Wells observed in her 2014 self-help book, “What Would Mary Ann Do?: A Guide to Life,” written with Steve Stinson. “She was bright, fair-minded and reasonable, and I like to think that’s what I brought to her. ... Sherwood Schwartz, the show’s producer and creator, was smart enough to put her in short shorts so you wouldn’t think of her as your bossy sister.”
Dawn Elberta Wells was born in Reno, Nev., on Oct. 18, 1938. She attended the allwomen’s Stephens College in Missouri with plans to study chemistry but developed an interest in the arts and
transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle.
Struggling to find challenging work after “Gilligan’s Island,” Wells turned to stage productions, often appearing in Neil Simon plays. She also had a featured role in the serial-killer movie thriller “The Town That Dreaded Sundown” (1976).
She told the New York Times that certain doors were closed to her, one of them being a staging of the Eve Ensler play “The Vagina Monologues.” “Are you out of your mind?” she recalled producers asking. “Mary Ann?” (She was hired for a touring production.)
In the late 1980s, Wells created a now-defunct clothing line for the elderly and disabled called Wishing Wells. For a time, she lived in Idaho and served as chief executive of the nonprofit Idaho Film and Television Institute, an actor’s workshop that shuttered in 2009.