Bob Denver, 70, ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Star
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Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV show “Gilligan’s Island” made him an iconic figure to generations of TV viewers, died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Carolina. He was 70 and had cancer and underwent quadruple bypass surgery earlier this year.
Denver’s signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 he was already widely known to TV audiences for another character, Maynard G. Krebs, the bearded beatnik friend of Dwayne Hickman’s Dobie in the “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” which aired on CBS from 1959 to 1963.
Krebs, whose only desire was to play the bongos and hang out at coffee houses, would shriek every time the word “work” was mentioned in his presence.
Gilligan, on the other hand, was industrious but inept.
TV critics dismissed the show as inane. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences in syndicated reruns and reunion films, and the recent TBS reality series “The Real Gilligan’s Island.”
Denver went on to star in other TV series, as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows. But he never escaped the role of Gilligan.
“It was the mid-’70s when I realized it wasn’t going off the air,” Denver told the Associated Press in 2001. “I certainly didn’t set out to have a series rerun forever, but it’s not a bad experience at all.”