Producer Dwayne Hickman, who played Dobie Gillis, has died

Hickman had small parts in movies and TV shows as a youngster, but had given up acting by 1950 to concentrate on his studies at Los Angeles’ Cathedral High School. After graduation, he entered Loyola University.

“I was in the art program and was heading toward architecture when I got a call from my old agent toward the end of my freshman year,” he recalled in a 2003 interview. “He said he had a role for me in ‘The Bob Cummings Show.’”

Hickman went on to play Chuck MacDonald, the teenage nephew who tried to get a piece of his Uncle Bob’s action as Cummings’ Bob Collins character worked as a photographer of glamour girls. Hickman, meanwhile, continued his studies on the side, eventually earning a degree in economics from Loyola.

“The Bob Cummings Show” (later called “Love That Bob”) lasted from 1955 to 1959, and toward the end of its run Hickman made a pilot for author Max Shulman about a lovelorn 16-year-old named Dobie Gillis who pursued, but could never win the heart of, almost every girl he saw.

“The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” marked by sharp humor and a brilliant young cast that also included Bob Denver, Warren Beatty and Tuesday Weld, was an instant hit when it debuted in 1959.

“The chief contradiction is that Dobie never gets the girl,” Hickman once said. “His is a false aggressiveness; everything he attempts in life backfires and pushes him into last place.” As a result, Hickman’s Dobie would often spend a part of the show standing in front of a copy of the statue of Rodin’s “The Thinker,” philosophizing about his bumbling efforts at life and love.