tinyurl.com/7nqoa -> www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2005/09/06/entertainment/e113847D19.DTL&type=entertainment
entertainment links (09-06) 14:20 PDT Los Angeles (AP) -- Bob Denver, whose portrayal of goofy castaway Gilligan on the 1960s TV sh ow "Gilligan's Island" made him an iconic figure to generations of TV vi ewers, has died. He died Friday at Wake Forest University Baptist Hospital in North Caroli na of complications from treatment he was receiving for cancer, his agen t, Mike Eisenstadt, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. His wife, Dreama, and children Patrick, Megan, Emily and Colin were with Denver, who also had undergone quadruple heart bypass surgery earlier th is year. "He was my everything and I will love him forever," Dreama Denver said in a statement. Denver's signature role was Gilligan, but when he took the role in 1964 h e was already widely known to TV audiences for another iconic 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 ho uses, would shriek every time the word "work" was mentioned in his prese nce. Viewers embraced the skinny kid in the Bu ster Brown haircut and white sailor hat. "As silly as it seems to all of us, it has made a difference in a lot of children's lives," Dawn Wells, who played castaway Mary Ann Summers, onc e said. But after it was canceled by CBS in 1967, it found new audiences over and over in syndic ated reruns and reunion films, including 1981's "The Harlem Globetrotter s on Gilligan's Island." ") One of the most recent of those films was 2001's "Surviving Gilligan's Is land: The Incredibly True Story of the Longest Three Hour Tour in Histor y," in which other actors portrayed the original seven-member cast while three of the four surviving original members, including Denver, narrate d and reminisced. "Gilligan's Island" writer-creator Sherwood Schwartz insisted that the sh ow had social meaning along with the laughs: "I knew that by assembling seven different people and forcing them to live together, the show would have great philosophical implications." Denver went on to star in other TV series, including "The Good Guys" and "Dusty's Trail," as well as to make numerous appearances in films and TV shows. But he never escaped the role of Gilligan, so much so that in one of his top 10 lists "the top 10 things that will make you stand up and cheer" "Late Show" host David Letterman once simply shouted out Denver's nam e to raucous applause. "It was the mid-'70s when I realized it wasn't going off the air," Denver told The Associated Press in 2001, noting then that he enjoyed checking eBay each day to keep up on the prices "Gilligan's Island" memorabilia were fetching. "I certainly didn't set out to have a series rerun forever, but it's not a bad experience at all," he added.
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