Dawn Wells on ‘Gilligan’s Island’ and Playing Mary Ann

She may have been relegated, along with Russell Johnson's the Professor, to part of "and the rest" on the season 1 theme song of Gilligan's Island, but Dawn Wells' Mary Ann Summers instantly became one of the most beloved characters on the 1964 to 1967 sitcom about seven stranded castaways. And a lot of that has to do with the late actress herself. 

"Dawn received five times the fan mail of anybody else," points out Lloyd J. Schwartz, son of series creator Sherwood Schwartz, "and I think it's because she came across as so accessible."

Pop culture historian and the actress' friend, Geoffrey Mark, reflects on her fondly, commenting, "Dawn knew she was beautiful, but never knew how beautiful. Dawn knew she was talented, but she never really knew how talented and she was really a great actor. She made Mary Ann so sweet, so real, so lovable and so sexy without being a sexpot. She informed this character with many traits of her own and some that were not, making the character, six decades out, a television icon."

Dawn Elberta Wells was born on October 18, 1938 in Reno, Nevada, and would graduate from Seattle's University of Washington in 1960 with a degree in theater arts and design. At the same time, she was competing in beauty contests, winning Miss Nevada in 1959 and represented the state in the 1960 Miss America pageant held in Atlantic City, New Jersey. 

What types of Classic TV shows do you want to read about?

Her acting career began on television with 22 guest star appearances on a number of shows between 1961's "The Captain Dan Brady Story" episode of Wagon Train and 1964's "Joey and Roberta Sherwood Play a Benefit" episode of The Joey Bishop Show, all prior to being cast as Mary Ann in Gilligan's Island.

This unseen and unpublished exclusive interview with Dawn Wells was conducted in 2019, less than a year before she passed away on December 30, 2020 from COVID-19 at the age of 82.

WOMAN'S WORLD: Is it mind-blowing that Gilligan's Island is celebrating 55 years?

DAWN WELLS: It truly is, but only because I'm not that old [laughs]. What's amazing to me is that the critics hated it and thought it was the worst thing in the entire world, yet we've never been off the air since 1964. It says something about what Sherwood Schwartz created.

WW: Let's explore that—what does it say?

DW: Well, it was a sitcom that took the viewer out of the living room and it was pretty to look at; it wasn't mom and dad with three kids in the Bronx. Everything about it was positive. I think it was a great, talented cast and seeing a sitcom with beautiful palm trees and stuff around it was different. Yes, the writing was silly, but no sillier than any other sitcom in that generation. It's very interesting that nobody thought it would last 20 minutes ... but here we are.

WW: Is the whole classic TV/Gilligan's Island thing something you've always embraced or did you have to kind of come around to it when you realized it wasn't going away?

DW: Well, it's interesting, because Dawn Wells is very much a Mary Ann in that I'm very positive, I always have a good outlook on everything. I always want to play the b---h, and I always want to play the hooker. I never get to, I always have to play the Good Girl and Mary Ann was very much who I've done a lot of, so to speak. I even wrote the book, What Would Mary Ann Do? We need a Mary Ann today, pointing us in the right direction. Moms and dads are both working, kids are on drugs and it's a very different civilization these days. My mother knew where I was every single minute, and I grew up in Nevada. My parents were divorced, but my mother knew everything I was doing. Today it's a different world and I think Gilligan's Island kind of brings the whole family together to say right is right, good is good and I think that's the reason it's lasted.

When I got cast as Mary Ann, I thought, "Here I go again, another ingenue." But after the show I did go back to the stage doing Owl and the Pussycat and a lot of pretty dramatic roles. And I finally got to play that hooker and b---h. So I was able to satisfy my acting desires in other areas. But I embraced Gilligan's Island, because I thought the show was a good one. It isn't something where I was, like, "Oh, could I please get into that one?", but I was blessed that I was cast and equally blessed when I went back to work and was able to break that image. So I've had success with the show and beyond it.

WW: Was it hard to cope with the fact that residuals were so limited on a show that was rerun so many times over the decades?

DW: It is hard to accept, but you have to rationalize it and realize that that's the way it was. Nobody came in at the beginning and said, "If it's ever going to run again, I want $10,000 a week." No one even knew to say that. We did get paid, I think, for the first five reruns of each episode and maybe I made a total of $50,000. But you can't go back and change the past.

WW: You mentioned the book you wrote. What led you to write it?

DW: Because I think Mary Ann's a character that's not on television very much. She kept everybody on their toes. You couldn't read the scripts this way, but I think she was the moral compass.  She wanted to make sure the Howells weren't fighting and she and Ginger got along. Nowadays, you'd probably have them in competition with each other.

WW: You brought up Ginger, which raises the question of why Tina Louise seems to be the one cast member who, for the most part, has completely refused to embrace the Gilligan's Island legacy.

DW: I don't think she was told the truth about the show. I think that maybe her agent said to her, "You're going to be the movie star on an island" and I think that she, in her mind, thought, "Oh, I'm the movie star on the island. That doesn't mean that I have other actors with me." That's my perception, but she also considered herself a star. I don't know what her salary was; maybe she wasn't getting paid enough. She certainly looked beautiful and she certainly had as good a role as anyone else, but I think maybe her agent said, "I've got a show for you." But I have to say, she was not temperamental to work with. She might've been with the directors, but not with us. And she taught me a lot. I learned a lot about camera angles and things like that.

WW: Years ago you commented that you would receive fan mail from soldiers in Vietnam who said that Mary Ann actually helped them get through the tough times. What was the connection?

DW: Talking about the soldiers across the sea, I think you wanted to marry Mary Ann. You wanted Mary Ann to be your sister. You wanted her to be your wife, the mother of your children. All the things that Mary Ann kind of stood for were the good things. And Sherwood was smart enough to put me in shorts to make me sexy. And she had balls, pardon the expression. She stood up for what she believed in. She had as much to say as anybody else, but she did it nicely. And I'd like to think the same is true about me.

Fast facts about Dawn Wells

• She was the founder of the educational organization, the Idaho Film and Television Institute

• Her post-Gilligan’s Island credits include the 1976 horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a 2016 episode of the daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful and the 2019 animated series The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants. 

• Dawn was married once, to talent agent Larry Rosen, from 1962 until their divorce in 1967.

Who is your favorite character on ‘Gilligan’s Island’?

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale...

Alan Hale Jr: 16 Surprising Facts About the Skipper From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

Jim Backus: 10 Little-Known Facts About the Beloved Mr. Howell From ‘Gilligan’s Island’

See the ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Cast Young: Bob Denver, Tina Louise and More Before They Were Castaways