'Gilligan's Island' star Tina Louise gets real about troubled childhood before fame

Gilligan's Island star Tina Louise is sharing the awful truth about her childhood before she found fame.

The actress, 91, who became a household name when she got cast as the glamorous Ginger Grant in the popular sitcom, recently dropped the audio version of her 1997 book, Sunday: A Memoir. Tina Louise told Fox News Digital that, for the first time, she finally felt able to reflect on her childhood in detail.

"I didn’t live with my mother until I was 11," Tina Louise told the outlet. "I had a whole period of life without her… I kept all of that inside of me. And then, I developed anger. By the time I was picked up by my mother, she was with her third husband and had a different life. It was a very sophisticated life that she wanted for herself, so she found a very successful man."

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Tina Louise's rough childhood explored: From her parents' divorce to living in a boarding school

Tina Louise began her career as a stage actress in the mid-1950s, though she eventually went on to earn a Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in 1958 for her role in God's Little Acre. She was cast in Gilligan's Island in 1964, though it only ran for three seasons.

"I live in the present," Louise shared. "But I’ve never dealt with what happened to me. When the book first came out, my mother was alive. She didn’t like it to the point that she said I made it up. I understood that as her not wanting to deal with it… She was the most dominant force in my life."

When Tina Louise was born, her mother was 18 and her father, 28. They parted ways when she was 4, and two years later, she was sent to live in a boarding school in Ardsley, New York.

"I didn’t want to be there right from the start," she explained. "We were all just a bunch of angry little girls. It was like ‘Lord of the Flies’ — nobody wanted to be there. And there were gangs of little girls. You were always going to find someone to pick on. I was told that my job was to hit this little girl. It was ridiculous. I never figured out why they chose me."

She continued, revealing that she "kept trying to catch a very bad cold so that I could hardly speak, so I could leave this place."

"They kept giving me hot milk. I was asked to call my mother. I told her I wanted to come to her, but I was told it wasn’t the time to get out. I learned she was with her second husband, and he didn’t want a little girl in the house. He just wanted to be alone with his beautiful wife," she noted.

Reflecting on her life in boarding school, Tina Louise revealed that she was never allowed to keep many personal effects.

"They took everything away," Louise recalled. "My mother once brought me a doll, and that was immediately taken away in the night. I don’t remember ever getting it back. You don’t remember things like that. You just remember that it was taken away."

She spoke of how she would always wait for Sundays to roll around, as it was visiting day, but her parents never came.

"I yearned for hugs," she said. "I don’t think I knew what was going on. I just knew that it was painful."

By age 8, she moved into her father and his new wife's home, though by age 11, her mother wanted her to join her and her new doctor husband.

"I was very upset," she said. "I could never even say his name. It couldn’t come out of my mouth… I just expected him to do something about it. When I went to live with my mother, I couldn’t believe that I had to tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore. It’s very strange, a strange thing, to put something like that on me because I wanted to see him."

Speaking of her bond with her mother, the veteran actress told the outlet:

"She was a vivacious person, but she had lost her mother when she was 3. So she had her problems… She couldn’t have imagined that, at age 18, she would have a child. She didn’t have a mother. My grandfather, who I only saw twice, put his children in an orphanage for a while. Then he got a nanny."

Tina Louise went on:

"My mother had her dream world," she reflected. "She wanted to live a certain way and be surrounded by certain people. She was very beautiful. She loved the arts. But she lost her temper a lot with people… I don’t think she realized it herself… But she did go along with the fact that I wanted to study acting. And that was very exciting."

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The Daily Mail has reported that Tina Louise now lives in New York City, spending her time as a tutor to young children. According to Fox News Digital, she works for Learning Readers, which is a nonprofit that facilitates trained volunteers to teach public school students across New York City how to read.