LOS ANGELES (AP) — James Darren, a teen idol who sparked the surfing trend of the 1960s as a charismatic beach boy alongside Sandra Dee in the hit film “Gidget,” died Monday at the age of 88.
Darren died in his sleep in a Los Angeles hospital, his son Jim Moret told news agencies.
Moret told the Hollywood Reporter that Darren was supposed to have aortic valve replacement surgery but was too weak for the operation. “I always thought he would make it,” his son told the entertainment industry, “because he was so cool. He was always cool.”
In his long career, Darren has worked as an actor and singer, and behind the scenes he has built a successful career as a television director, directing episodes of such popular series as Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place. In the 1980s, he played Officer Jim Corrigan in the television police series TJ Hooker.
But young film fans of the late 1950s will remember him best as Moondoggie, the dark-haired surfer boy in the hit 1959 film “Gidget.” Dee played the title character, a spirited Southern Californian who goes to the beach and eventually falls in love with Moondoggie.
“I was in love with Sandra,” Darren later recalled. “I thought she was absolutely perfect as Gidget. She had incredible charm.”
The film is based on a novel written by Californian Frederick Kohner about his own teenage daughter, who sparked an interest in surfing – an interest that influenced pop music, slang and even fashion.
For Darren, his success with teenage fans led to a record deal, as it did for many young actors of the time, including Tab Hunter and Annette Funicello. Two of Darren’s singles, “Goodbye Cruel World” and “Her Royal Majesty,” reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. (“Goodbye Cruel World” also appeared in Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical 2022 film The Fables.) Other singles included “Gidget” and “Angel Face.”
Darren was the only Gidget cast member to appear in both sequels, Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) and Gidget Goes to Rome (1963). Dee was replaced by Deborah Walley in the second film and Cindy Carol in the third. (“Gidget” was later broadcast as a television series and launched the career of Sally Field.)
“They had me under contract, I was a prisoner,” Darren told Entertainment Weekly in 2004. “But with these lovely young ladies, it was the best prison I’ll ever be in.”
As a contract actor at Columbia Studios, Darren also appeared in adult films, including The Rico Brothers, 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 acting career on the big screen was almost over. After the late 1960s, he appeared in only a handful of films, most recently in 2017’s “Lucky,” directed by John Carroll Lynch.
However, he remained active in television, appearing in the lead role in the science fiction series “Time Tunnel” in the late 1960s and taking on guest appearances and small recurring roles in television series such as “Love Boat,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Fantasy Island.”
In the 1980s, Darren was a regular on four seasons of the William Shatner-starring series TJ Hooker. During his appearance on the show, he noticed that there was no director listed for one of the next sequences and asked if he could audition for it.
“When the film was released, I got several offers to direct,” he told the New York Daily News. “Soon I got so many offers to direct that I basically gave up acting and singing.”
For nearly two years, Darren directed episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, Hunter, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210 and other series. He returned to acting in the 1990s with small roles in Melrose Place and Star Trek, Deep Space Nine.
Born James Ercolani in 1936, Darren grew up in South Philadelphia, not far from ’50s and ’60s teen idols like Fabian and Frankie Avalon. Singing came easily to him, and by age 14 he was performing in local nightclubs.
“I knew I wanted to be an entertainer or maybe famous when I was five or six,” he said in a 2003 interview with the News-Press of Fort Myers, Florida. He noted that greats like Eddie Fisher and Al Martino had lived in the same area as him, “a real neighborhood. You felt like you could be successful, too.”
According to a 1958 Los Angeles Times profile, his break came when he went to New York to have some photographs taken and the photographer’s office put him in touch with a talent scout.
Soon after, he was signed by Columbia Pictures, and the newspaper reported that after a few appearances, his fan mail at the studio was “surpassed only by that of Kim Novak. … The studio now believes the young man is ready to hit the jackpot.”
Darren married his first wife, Gloria, in 1955 and had Moret, an Inside Edition correspondent and former CNN anchor. After a divorce, he married Evy Norlund, who came to the United States as a Danish contestant in the Miss Universe pageant. They had two sons, Christian and Anthony.
He was also the godfather of Nancy Sinatra’s daughter, AJ Lambert. Sinatra, his co-star in “For Those Who Think Young,” posted an obituary in the Hollywood Reporter on her X page, complete with a broken-heart emoji.
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The lead author of this obituary is Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014.
