‘Gilligan’s Island’ Star Tina Louise Opens Up About Tough Childhood

Lauren Novak March 18, 6:09 pm

Tina Louise 'Gilligans' Island' Now and Then — Cindy Ord/Getty Images for FLC

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Tina Louise, best known for her role as Ginger in Gilligan’s Island, would love to be known for something else. These days, her greatest joy is spending time with her family and reading to children at a local school. Perhaps it is because Louise had a tough childhood that she loves to spend time with children and give them some happy memories. She opened up about her upbringing in her memoir called Sunday, which focuses on three years in her young life spent at Ardsley Heights Country School and Camp for Girls, a boarding school in Ardsley, NY.

Louise recalls being forced to stay alone in a dark bathroom with bugs crawling on the ceiling at night and being stabbed by a student with a pencil. “We were just little angry girls that were put in this place, and nobody wanted to be there,” she said to the New York Times,

GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, Tina Louise, 1964-1967

Everett Collection

She was sent to the school after her parents divorced and her mother felt unable to care for her, having her at a young age. Louise was able to leave the school at age 9 and moved in with her father and stepmother. At age 11, she moved back in with her mother. “It was like going from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Eloise at the Plaza,” Louise said.

While she struggled with intense loneliness as a child, it drew her to join the nonprofit organization Learning Leaders, which helped children with their reading skills. While the organization shut down a few years ago, she continues to volunteer on her own. She has worked with young kids for decades. “I loved it, being anonymous, just being the person who read to the children,” she shared. “That was very important to me because nobody ever read to me.”