When you are a young actor who is starting to make a little progress in Hollywood, you might be tempted to look to the future of what your career could be in five years and strategy with your agent to target roles in the types of films that best put your talents. Maybe you come to life in romantic comedies. Maybe you are ideal as a heavy silencer. You may be Laurence Olivier of the old fat mechanics which is harassed by detectives while working on the bearing train of a car. You may know where you are heading, but you don’t want to cut opportunities before reserving stable work.
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Consider the career of Russell Johnson. The man who would be Professor Roy Hinkley on “Gilligan’s Island” survived to be killed by the Japanese army during the Second World War before asking for glory and fortune as an actor in Hollywood. He had perfectly the right to believe that he was playing with the money of the house for the rest of his life, but if it was serious to become an actor who works, he had to keep his options open. In the 1950s, Johnson probably found his great success on the big screen in the classics of the genus B-Film like “This Island Earth”, “Attack of the Crab Monsters” and “Rock All Night”. He was a beautiful guy with an easy way of him, but at some point, it was obvious that he was not on the track of the main man. As the 1960s took place, he was quite clearly a television player.
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At the time, if you wanted to take a long television series, it did not hurt your way around a Western set. Could you Amble? Have you seemed to go get a cowboy hat? Were you comfortable at califourchon on a horse? Russell could answer yes to two of these questions, but an element of Westerners was a prohibited for the actor, which is why he found himself (successfully) washed on “the island of Gilligan”.
The professor despised horses
In an interview with the Philadelphia Daily News (Transcribed by METV), Johnson, who seemed to be a guy as sweet as the teacher, revealed that he was almost unshakable in the westerns because he despised horses. It was not a case of equinophobia (a condition that afflicts Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and the former security of Kansas City Eric Berry); Johnson has just done so for four -legged oats. What were his damage? As he said to the Daily News:
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“I have always hated horses. I tried to convince the producer that I would be the only marshal in a television western who did not ride a horse – who has always worked in pursuit of the bad guys. He would not listen to me, however, and I was stuck on a horse.”
Johnson has played in many Westerns films and played the role of Marshal Gib Scott in the series of short -term “Black Saddle” networks. It was apparently enough to deactivate the horses for good. “I think that may be why I am so happy with” Gilligan’s Island “,” he said. “I hate westerns because of the horses that hate me.” Johnson died in 2014 at the age of 89. If he ended up softening his opinions on these magnificent creatures, this change of heart has never been expressed publicly.
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