Jim Backus: 10 Facts About 'Gilligan's Island' Star Mr. Howell

Even towards the end, Jim Backus, best known as Mr. Howell from Gilligan's Island and the original voice of cartoon character Mr. Magoo, seemed to be focused on his craft. It was during the filming of the TV movie The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, third in the series of reunion films but the first in which the actor was unable to fully participate.

Producer Lloyd J. Schwartz, son of Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz, explains, "Jim was very ill at the time and he couldn't do it. We recast with a guy named David Ruprecht to play Thurston's son. Jim called my dad during the filming and said, 'Can I do a day?' As a result, we rewrote the script so that Mr. Howell came to the island and had a few lines. He didn't have the energy to do anymore than that."

After that, Backus came up to Sherwood Schwartz and asked if he was okay in the scene, to which he was told that he was. "But was I funny?"

"And dad," says Lloyd, "said, 'Yes, Jim, you were funny. It's good.' And they walked off together. Everybody on the set was crying, because they knew that this was probably the last time they would see Jim. He died shortly thereafter."

For Jim Backus, comedy and his career went hand in hand.

1. Jim Backus started out as a radio star

Backus was born James Gilmore Backus on February 25, 1913 in Cleveland, Ohio. In his teens he attended the Kentucky Military Institute along with future actor Victor Mature — though he was expelled when he decided to ride a horse through the mess hall. By his 20s he was a rising star in radio, the entertainment world's answer to television before there was such a thing. In a 1946 profile of the actor, The Jackson Sun chronicled things this way:

"It was appendicitis that put Backus into radio. After studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he was playing with a stock company in his hometown, Cleveland. While recovering from his illness, his doctor advised him to take it easy, so Backus took a job as staff announcer at Station WTAM in Cleveland. It put him in radio, even though it didn't fit the doctor's prescription."

It seems that in those days, an "announcer" was expected to not only ... well, announce for the station, but do a wide variety of chores as well, among them sweeping the place out each morning.

2. From Broadway to 'The Jim Backus Show'

In 1936 he traveled to New York and gave Broadway a shot, but Broadway didn't care, so he returned to radio to gain some acting experience. "Three years later," says The Jackson Sun, "he turned to comedy writing and there made more of a dent in radio's consciousness. The build-up continued until 1942 when he had his own show for a short time and was hailed as a comedy find."

On July 2, 1942, The Tampa Times said of a recent episode of the series named after him, "It provides a relaxing period in the mid-weekly radio schedule when listening nonsense is carried on between the loquacious horse Ambrose and his adherent, Jim Backus, who uses this comedy foil for the 'carryall' of a lot of gags, wit and humor."

Although critics seemed to like the show, which was syndicated to a number of radio stations, it didn't stay on the air very long.

3. Backus decided to go dramatic

In 1943, he started voicing characters on dramatic shows, one of the interesting ones being the title role in Flashgun Casey, a CBS series co-starring Jone Allison as Ann Williams, his "Girl Friday." The show focused on the adventures of a press photographer. There were also the anthology shows Escape and Suspense, both of which allowed him to play a variety of characters.

4. Hubert Updike III

The character played by Jim Backus that really grabbed the audience's attention was Hubert Updike III, who was absolutely a forerunner to Mr. Howell. Although he had played the character on The Ed Wynn Show and Beatrice Kay Show, as well as The Bob Hope Show, it was when he became a regular on The Alan Young Show (which ran from 1944 to 1949, the host of which would go on to star in TV's Mister Ed) that the character became a sensation.

On October 23, 1946, the Valley Times offered this description: "Hubert is the immensely wealthy chap, dripping with blue blood and broad A's. Elegant is no word for Hubert! When Alan asks him to sit down, Hubert will likely as not drawl, 'Sorry, can't do it. This chair looks like it's been used.' Hubert will tell you that despite his Blue Book social status, 'My family didn't land on Plymouth Rock — they waited for something better. I think it was Chrysler Rock.' Then there was the time he had to junk his brand new car — he wanted to go to Beverly Hills and it was pointing the wrong way."

Backus not only credited Alan Young as "a great guy to work with," but also the writers, including the aforementioned Sherwood Schwartz, who would, of course, bring the actor back into Hubert Updike III territory with Thurston Howell III a couple of decades later.

5. 'Rebel Without a Cause' and other movie roles

He appeared in 66 films prior to Gilligan's Island between 1949's One Last Fling and 1964's Advance to the Rear. Some of the more high profile titles include Marilyn Monroe's Don't Bother to Knock (1952), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), starring James Dean;  and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

6. TV, Backus style

From 1952 to 1955, Jim Backus co-starred along with Joan Davis on the sitcom I Married Joan, portraying Judge Bradley Stevens, married to the scatterbrained Joan — who's more than a little Lucy Ricardo-inspired. When it was over, the actor said of the experience, "A series like I married Joan dissipates you as a personality. I played a judge on the show and after awhile, every time my name would come up, everyone would think of me as just that — the kindly judge on the Joan Davis show.”

David C. Tucker, author of Joan Davis: America’s Queen of Film, Radio and Television Comedy, comments, “I Married Joan gave Jim three years of steady work and made him better-known to television audiences, but in some ways it was a frustrating experience. He wanted to be Joan Davis’ full-fledged co-star in the series, but the scripts put the comic emphasis on her. Playing her wacky character’s level-headed husband didn’t allow him full range to be as funny as he could be. The reruns played for years afterward, and he worried that he would be typecast in a role that he wanted to move beyond."

He tried, from 1960 to 1961, with The Jim Backus Show, aka Hot Off the Wire, playing Mike O'Toole, owner and operator of a second-rate news service that is struggling to stay in business. The show couldn't, being canceled after a single season.

In between all of this, in 1960, he was inducted to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And, just to showcase his diversity, four years later he made the 36-hole cut at the 1964 Bing Crosby Pro-Am Tournament.

7. Mr. Magoo

Perhaps equally as well known as Mr. Howell is Jim Backus' other most famous role, cartoon character Mr. Magoo, the near-sighted elderly man with a penchant for unintended adventures. He voiced the character for the first time in "Ragtime Bear," a 1949 animated short, and would go on to do so again in more than 50 other shorts. TV audiences saw in him the series Mister Magoo (1960 to 1961), The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo (1964 to 1965) and What's New, Mr. Magoo (1977). On top of that, there were the TV movies Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), Mr. Magoo in Sherwood Forest (1964) and Uncle Sam Magoo (1970).

"On radio you had to have an alternate voice you could use should you be cast in two parts on the same show," Backus told The Times of San Mateo. "My radio double was similar to the voice that became Mr. Magoo. I added his laugh when I was entertaining friends at parties, then locked on the whole thing when they asked me to do the voice for Magoo. In the beginning, he was a dirty old man. Half the time you couldn't understand what he was saying, he just used to mumble."

Although Magoo brought him great success financially, there was definitely a downside. “Magoo cost me dramatic parts,” he told the Valley Times of North Hollywood. “I walk into the producer’s office and he falls on the floor. He can’t believe I could do dramatic parts. He says, ‘Do Magoo for me! Say hello to my children on the phone.’ You feel like such an idiot."

8. The Millionaire...

While the concept — take a microcosm of society and strand them on a desert island following a shipwreck to see how they interact — sounds like a variation of Lord of the Flies, nothing could be further from the truth when it came to the execution of Sherwood Schwartz's now iconic Gilligan's Island. On the show, of course, Jim Backus played "the millionaire," Thurston Howell III.

Explains Lloyd Schwartz, "Dad had worked with Jim on the radio and then he worked with him on I Married Joan. Dad sent him the script for Gilligan’s Island and said, ‘If you read the script, you’re not going to want the part,’ because at that time it was much thinner and there wasn’t much Mr. Howell there, but Jim trusted him and took the part.”

“He was right,” Jim said, “but his description of the series sounded so ridiculous, I figured it couldn’t miss … We succeeded against some of the worst reviews of all time. They weren’t reviews, really; they were character assassinations. What the reviewers didn’t realize was that our show was a put-on. Critics were accustomed to the Ozzie and Harriet/Donna Reed Show sort of thing. They took us literally.”

Gilligan's Island originally ran from 1964 to 1967, and has never been off the air since. Backus would voice the character of Mr. Howell on the Saturday morning cartoons The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974 to 1975) and Gilligan's Planet (1982). And then there were the very successful reunion TV movies Rescue from Gilligan's Island (1978), The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979) and the aforementioned The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981).

9. Jim Backus, his final years

Jim Backus smiling as he poses beneath comedy and tragedy masks, which are mounted on the wall behind, circa 1960.In the last part of his life, Jim Backus found himself battling a horrible case of hypochondria that resulted in his becoming a near-recluse, convinced he was suffering from Parkinson's disease and going to die. But he knew it was in his head, telling the Petaluma Argus-Courier in 1984, "I was working terribly hard. I was going full barrel and I was suffering the classic overwork symptoms of dizziness, light-headedness, irascibility. Then I started to faint and fall down a lot. They put me in the hospital and gave me the works and evaluated it as Parkinson’s. Psychosomatic is an overused word. To me, the physical problems were very real and still are. There is no accurate evaluation of what I have. I haven’t been out of this house in almost six years."

10. In his personal life...

Jim Backus was married to actress Betty Kean from 1939 to 1942, and then to Broadway showgirl Henny Backus from 1943 until the time of his death, which took place from pneumonia on July 3, 1989 in Los Angeles. He was 76..

It's always difficult to summarize somebody's life in less than 2,000 words, but if Jim Backus — the man who gave us Hubert Updike III, Thurston Howell III and Mr. Magoo, among others — was driven by a need to be funny and wondered at the end if he was, the answer was obvious.

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