{"id":476000,"date":"2026-02-15T06:48:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T06:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/476000\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T06:48:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T06:48:07","slug":"love-boat-star-ted-lange-was-warned-not-to-talk-to-guest-star-gene-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/476000\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Love Boat’ star Ted Lange was warned not to talk to guest star Gene Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Love Boat<\/a> star Ted Lange has some fond memories of the time Gene Kelly<\/a> guested on the show \u2014 even though he was warned not to go near the Hollywood legend at all.\n<\/p>\n

Lange \u2014 who played bartender Isaac Washington on the cruise ship-set romantic comedy series from 1977 to 1986 \u2014 said he had a surprising first encounter with Kelly when they filmed a 1984 episode of the series together, he told \u00a0Still Here Hollywood\u00a0podcast<\/a> host Steve Kmetko in a reposted clip (below).\n<\/p>\n

“[The producers said], ‘Don’t talk to Gene. He’s a grumpy guy, so just leave him alone. When you do your scenes, fine, but don’t talk to Gene,'” Lange recalled. “We all said, ‘Okay, yeah, fine.'”\n<\/p>\n

In the episode, Kelly played a retired spy, and in between their scenes together, Lange decided not to heed the warning.\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

“He was reading a magazine,” Lange said. “He wore contacts\u00a0and\u00a0glasses. So he’s sitting there, and he’s reading, and I said, ‘Screw this, I’m gonna go talk to Gene Kelly.’ So I go, he’s sitting in one chair, I sit across from him, I go, ‘Hi.'”\n<\/p>\n

At this, Lange said Kelly looked up at him, but pretty quickly went back to his magazine. Nevertheless, Lange persisted.\n<\/p>\n

“I said, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ You can see him go, ‘What?’ I said, ‘What was it like dancing with the Nicholas brothers?’ Now, for your audience that don’t know who they are, they’re two Black tap dancers out of the Cotton Club back [in the] Harlem Renaissance,” Lange said, referring to Fayard and Harold Nicholas. “And Gene put them in his movies. Oh my god, they were incredible dancers.”\n<\/p>\n

Ted Lange on ‘The Love Boat’.<\/p>\n

ABC Photo Archives\/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty<\/p>\n

“So he [went] like this,” Lange said, lowering his glasses to mimic Kelly’s movements. “‘You want to know about the Nicholas brothers?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So he told me this wonderful story about the Nicholas brothers. And then, they call us on the set, we go on the set, we do a scene together. Then we’re done, and we go back to the bus. He says, ‘Hey, you want to have a drink with me at the hotel?'”\n<\/p>\n

Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with\u00a0our\u00a0EW Dispatch newsletter<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Lange was thrilled by this, and he said, “After we finished our day’s work, I hooked up with him, sat down in the hotel, and he was wonderful \u2014 it was totally different.”\n<\/p>\n

In the end, he said he considers Kelly to be one of his favorite guest stars on the show, which famously employed many guests over the years \u2014 everyone from Hollywood legends (think Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, and Joan Fontaine) to up-and-coming talent (including Tom Hanks, Kathy Bates, Jamie Lee Curtis, Heather Locklear, and Billy Crystal).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Love Boat star Ted Lange has some fond memories of the time Gene Kelly guested on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476001,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75],"class_list":["post-476000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476000\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}