Gilligan’s Island Star Tina Louise Spotted in Rare Sighting at 91

Tina Louise is still a glamour girl.

The 91-year-old star, best known for playing Ginger Grant on Gilligan’s Island, was spotted in New York City on June 4. She was wearing jeans, a black jacket and oversized black sunglasses and was carrying an umbrella. Also visible was her signature red hair.

Louise played Ginger, a.k.a. “The Movie Star,” on Gilligan’s Island from 1964 to 1967. She is the only surviving cast member of the show’s main cast, which included Bob Denver as Gilligan and Alan Hale Jr. as The Skipper. But she did not return for any spin-offs and sequels and has had a complicated relationship with the series and her role as Ginger.

When Louise was cast in the series, she was appearing on Broadway in the 1964 musical Fade Out – Fade In, which starred Carol Burnett. “The CBS casting director Ethel Winant called me at the theater, ‘Do you think you could play this Lucille Ball/Marilyn Monroe-type of character?’ I said yes,” she told Forbes in March. “I got there and the director wanted it to be a more sarcastic kind of character. And so, then I didn’t even want to work on it anymore. I told him I wanted to quit.”

She met with the head of CBS and told him, “I didn’t want to play it and I didn’t think the show would be successful, changing the original idea of the character. You just can’t go into people’s homes and dress somebody up like a doll and then have her to be not nice.”

Richard Donner took over as director. “The writers started writing for what I was supposed to be doing and the show became a hit, and I enjoyed the part,” Louise said.

After the series ended, Louise appeared widely in film and television. On the big screen, she starred in the 1975 feminist horror classic The Stepford Wives. On TV, her credits include episodes of Ironside, Kojak, Dallas and The Love Boat. Her most recent acting appearance was in the 2019 film Tapestry. Pre-Gilligan, Louise won a Golden Globe for the 1958 film God’s Little Acre. She recounted her life in the 1997 memoir Sunday, re-released as an audiobook in 2023.

Speaking to The New York Times in March, she said of her career, “I’m very grateful for all the things that have happened to me and the opportunities that I’ve had,” while refusing to mention Gilligan’s Island by name. “I’d like to be known for other things,” she told the outlet. 

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Beginning in 1996, Louise joined Learning Leaders, a nonprofit that trained volunteers to tutor public school students and worked with kids in New York City. When the group lost its funding, she told the outlet, she began reading to children at the Upper East Side school she attended for seventh and eighth grade.