Rise to Fame
She won a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year at 24 for God's Little Acre (1958) and was weeks into the run of a Carol Burnett Broadway musical when the producers of Gilligan's Island came calling in 1964. The promise was that the show would revolve around her character. It didn't. She spent three seasons playing Ginger Grant, watched the silly sitcom become a cultural institution, and spent decades afterward insisting it had derailed what should have been a serious film career.
In the Spotlight
With Dawn Wells gone since December 2020, she's the last surviving member of the original Gilligan's Island cast, a fact she can't seem to escape. She skipped all three TV reunion movies the other cast members made in the late '70s and early '80s. At 91, she's been tutoring New York City public school students through a nonprofit called Learning Leaders, and reportedly, when it lost its funding, she covered it personally. She published Sunday: A Memoir and recorded the audiobook herself. The Ginger Grant retrospectives keep coming anyway.
Side Notes
Her training credentials were serious before the sitcom swallowed her reputation: Lee Strasberg, the Actors Studio, the same method factory that shaped the New Hollywood generation. After Gilligan's Island ended, she took grimmer work by design, playing a heroin addict on Kojak in 1974 and a cruel prison guard in a 1976 TV movie. Her daughter Caprice, from her marriage to radio host Les Crane, became an MTV producer and a novelist. At 91, she told the New York Times she'd prefer to be known for other things.