Dwayne Hickman, TV’s Dobie Gillis, has died aged 87

When former President Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, met actor Dwayne Hickman, he said, “Oh my gosh – it’s Dobie Gillis! I grew up with you!” Hickman, who played the title character on the hit TV show 1959-63 Many lovers by Dobie Gillis, dead sunday at his home in Los Angeles due to complications of Parkinson’s disease. According to a statement from his family, he is 87 years old and surrounded by family members.

Hickman’s television and film career was solid and lasted through the 1970s, and he went on to serve as the talent director of the Howard Hughes-owned Las Vegas Landmark Hotel casino, and then as program director at CBS , monitor WATER, Dukes of Hazzard, design women, and Maude, Related press report. He started studying painting in the late 1980s. But to many people, he was always Gillis, a teenage crush who never got a girl.

“Now that’s great,” Hickman told a reporter in 2003, during an exhibition of his paintings in St. Louis. “It’s been so sweet to see how much Dobie Gillis means to so many newbies who are so likable when I meet them.”

Hickman was born in Los Angeles in 1934, and like his brother, veteran character actor Darryl Hickman, he started acting as a child. However, he gave up in 1950 and began studying art and architecture at Loyola University when his former agent called and cast him in a supporting role on the show. The Bob Cummings show, which lasted from 1955 to 1959.

Many lovers by Dobie Gillis was an instant hit, with a clever script and a cast that included Bob Denver, Warren Beatty, and Tuesday Weld. Gillis went through the gig in futile attempts to win girl after girl – then pondered her failures and life in front of Rodin’s “Thinker” – never realized she had her one-sided lover, Sheila James Kuehl’s Zelda Gilroy. Kuehl, who went on to run for several terms in the California Senate, called Hickman “one stand up, sweet guy to the end.”

Hickman is survived by his third wife, Joan Roberts, and sons John and Albert.