'Gilligan's Island' star Tina Louise suffered troubled childhood before Hollywood fame

Fox News

05-04-2025

Before Tina Louise found herself stranded on a tropical island, she was plagued with loneliness as a child in boarding school.
The actress, who found fame as the glamorous Ginger Grant on the sitcom "Gilligan's Island," has recently released the audio version of her 1997 book, "Sunday: A Memoir." The star said that, for the first time, she finally felt free to discuss her painful childhood in depth.
"I didn't live with my mother until I was 11," Louise told Fox News Digital. "I had a whole period of life without her… I kept all of that inside of me. And then, I developed anger. By the time I was picked up by my mother, she was with her third husband and had a different life. It was a very sophisticated life that she wanted for herself, so she found a very successful man."
"I live in the present," Louise shared. "But I've never dealt with what happened to me. When the book first came out, my mother was alive. She didn't like it to the point that she said I made it up. I understood that as her not wanting to deal with it… She was the most dominant force in my life."
When Louise, then Tina Blacker, was born, her mother was 18 and her father was 10 years older. By the time she was 4 years old, they were divorced. At 6 years old, she was sent away to a boarding school in Ardsley, New York, where she wondered if her parents would ever come back for her.
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"I didn't want to be there right from the start," she explained. "We were all just a bunch of angry little girls. It was like 'Lord of the Flies' — nobody wanted to be there. And there were gangs of little girls. You were always going to find someone to pick on. I was told that my job was to hit this little girl. It was ridiculous. I never figured out why they chose me."
"I remember I kept trying to catch a very bad cold so that I could hardly speak, so I could leave this place," Louise shared. "They kept giving me hot milk. I was asked to call my mother. I told her I wanted to come to her, but I was told it wasn't the time to get out. I learned she was with her second husband, and he didn't want a little girl in the house. He just wanted to be alone with his beautiful wife."
One student stabbed Louise in the wrist with a pencil. A faint scar is still present, she said. When she was caught chatting with another little girl at night, Louise claimed a teacher made her stand alone in a pitch-black bathroom with spiders crawling on the ceiling. She described being slapped when she struggled to run a bath. Her closest friends were caterpillars she hid in a box under her bed. They were taken away, she said.
"They took everything away," Louise recalled. "My mother once brought me a doll, and that was immediately taken away in the night. I don't remember ever getting it back. You don't remember things like that. You just remember that it was taken away."
Louise always prayed for Sundays. It was visiting day. She always waited for her parents that day, but they didn't always come.
"I yearned for hugs," she said. "I don't think I knew what was going on. I just knew that it was painful."
It wouldn't be until Louise was 8 years old that she was able to move in with her father and his new wife. She was elated. But her happiness wouldn't last long. At age 11, her mother, who had married a wealthy doctor, the third of what would be four husbands, wanted her to live with them in a fancy New York City townhouse.
Louise admitted that, for years, she was angry at her father for not being willing to fight for her in court. She wouldn't see him until right before Hollywood came calling.
"I was very upset," she said. "I could never even say his name. It couldn't come out of my mouth… I just expected him to do something about it. When I went to live with my mother, I couldn't believe that I had to tell him that I couldn't see him anymore. It's very strange, a strange thing, to put something like that on me because I wanted to see him."
At age 22, a grown-up Louise, who had started acting, went out in search of her father.
"We had to establish a new relationship," she said. "It wasn't easy… but we had to rebuild."
Her relationship with her mother was complicated.
"She was a vivacious person, but she had lost her mother when she was 3," Louise explained. "So she had her problems… She couldn't have imagined that, at age 18, she would have a child. She didn't have a mother. My grandfather, who I only saw twice, put his children in an orphanage for a while. Then he got a nanny."
"My mother had her dream world," she reflected. "She wanted to live a certain way and be surrounded by certain people. She was very beautiful. She loved the arts. But she lost her temper a lot with people… I don't think she realized it herself… But she did go along with the fact that I wanted to study acting. And that was very exciting."
Louise would later escape from her past as a castaway. She catapulted to stardom on the '60s sitcom "Gilligan's Island." Over the years, it would continue to find new viewers, thanks to reruns and streaming platforms.
Louise insisted the show didn't make the cast rich. She previously told Forbes that she hasn't received residuals.
"Nobody was getting them at that time — nobody," she told Fox News Digital. "I read somewhere that [co-star] Dawn [Wells] was able to get something through a lawyer. But that's just what I read. I don't remember. But we never did. The people that owned it earned a lot of money, that's for sure. I'm just amazed that it's still on!"
In 1996, Louise read another article, one about the drop in students' ability to read, The New York Times reported. It prompted her to join Learning Leaders, a nonprofit that trained volunteers to tutor public school students throughout New York City. According to the outlet, she quietly worked with students for the next two decades.
The outlet noted that after the organization lost its funding a few years ago, Louise began helping out on her own.
It's something she still does today.
"It gives me so much joy," she said. "Helping students and giving them hope."