LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Darren, a teen idol who helped ignite the Nineteen Sixties browsing craze as a charismatic seashore boy paired off with Sandra Dee within the hit movie “Gidget,” died Monday at 88.
Darren died in his sleep at a Los Angeles hospital, his son Jim Moret advised information shops.
Moret advised The Hollywood Reporter that Darren was speculated to have had an aortic valve substitute however was too weak for the surgical procedure. “I always thought he would pull through,” his son advised the leisure commerce, “because he was so cool. He was always cool.”
In his lengthy profession, Darren acted, sang and constructed up a profitable behind-the-scenes profession as a tv director, helming episodes of such well-known collection as “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place.”
Within the Nineteen Eighties, he was Officer Jim Corrigan on the tv cop present “T.J. Hooker.”
However to younger film followers of the late Nineteen Fifties, he can be remembered greatest as Moondoggie, the dark-haired surfer boy within the smash 1959 launch “Gidget.”
Dee starred because the title character, a spunky Southern Californian who hits the seashore and ultimately falls in love with Moondoggie.
“I was in love with Sandra,” Darren later recalled. “I thought that she was absolutely perfect as Gidget. She had tremendous charm.”
The movie was primarily based on a novel {that a} California man, Frederick Kohner, had written about his personal teenage daughter and helped spur curiosity in browsing — one which influenced pop music, slang and even style.
For Darren, his success with teen followers led to a recording contract, because it did with many younger actors on the time, amongst them Tab Hunter and Annette Funicello.
Two of Darren’s singles, “Goodbye Cruel World” and “Her Royal Majesty,” reached the High 10 of the Billboard Sizzling 100 chart. (“Goodbye Cruel World” additionally appeared in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 semi-autobiographical movie, “The Fabelmans.”) Different singles included “Gidget” and “Angel Face.”
Darren was the one “Gidget” solid member who appeared in each its sequels, 1961′s “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” and 1963′s “Gidget Goes to Rome.”
Dee was changed by Deborah Walley within the second movie and Cindy Carol within the third. (“Gidget” later grew to become a tv present, launching the profession of Sally Area.)
“They had me under contract; I was a prisoner,” Darren advised Entertainment Weekly in 2004. “But with those lovely young ladies, it was the best prison I think I’ll ever be in.”
As a contract participant at Columbia Studios, Darren appeared in grown-up movies, too, together with “The Brothers Rico,” “Operation Meatball” and “The Guns of Navarone.”
By the mid-’60s, when Darren appeared in “For Those Who Think Young” and “The Lively Set,” his big-screen performing profession was nearly over. He appeared in only a handful of flicks after the Nineteen Sixties ended, final showing in 2017′s “Lucky,” directed by John Carroll Lynch.
However he remained lively on tv, showing as a lead on the sci-fi present “The Time Tunnel” within the late Nineteen Sixties, and doing visitor spots and small recurring roles in TV reveals resembling “The Love Boat,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Fantasy Island.”
Darren was a collection common for 4 seasons of the William Shatner-starrer “T.J. Hooker” within the Nineteen Eighties. Whereas showing on the present, he seen that no director was listed for an upcoming sequence and requested if he may check out for it.
“When it was shown, I got several offers to direct,” he advised the New York Every day Information. “Soon I was getting so many offers to direct, I kind of gave up acting and singing.”
For nearly two years, Darren directed episodes of “Walker, Texas Ranger,” “Hunter,” “Melrose Place,” “Beverly Hills 90210” and different collection. He returned to performing within the Nineteen Nineties with small roles in “Melrose Place” and “Star Trek, Deep Space Nine.”
Darren was born James Ercolani in 1936 and grew up in South Philadelphia, not removed from such fellow teen idols of the Nineteen Fifties and ’60s as Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Singing got here straightforward to him, and at 14 he was showing in native nightclubs.
“From the age of 5 or 6 I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, or famous maybe,” he stated in a 2003 interview with the Information-Press of Fort Myers, Florida. He famous that such luminaries as Eddie Fisher and Al Martino had lived in the identical space as he did, “a real neighborhood. It made you feel you could be successful, too.”
Based on a 1958 Los Angeles Occasions profile, he received a break when he went to New York to get some footage taken and the photographer’s workplace put him in contact with a expertise scout.
He was quickly signed by Columbia Photos, and the newspaper stated that after a couple of appearances, his fan mail on the studio was operating “second only to Kim Novak’s. … The studio now feels that the young man is ready to hit the jackpot.”
Darren married his first spouse, Gloria, in 1955 and collectively had Moret, an “Inside Edition” correspondent and former CNN anchorman. After a divorce he married Evy Norlund, who got here to the U.S. because the Danish entry within the Miss Universe contest. That they had two sons, Christian and Anthony.
He was additionally the godfather of Nancy Sinatra’s daughter A.J. Lambert. Sinatra, his “For Those Who Think Young” co-star, posted The Hollywood Reporter obituary on her X web page, with a damaged coronary heart emoji.
Bob Thomas, a longtime Related Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal author of this obituary.
