Movies

Original Wednesday Addams actress was 64 – The Hollywood Reporter

January 30, 2023

Lisa Loring, the actress who played Wednesday Addams in the classic TV adaptation of The Addams Family, is dead. She was 64 years old.

Loring died Saturday night at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of complications from a stroke caused by high blood pressure, her daughter Vanessa Foumberg said. The Hollywood Reporter.

“She left peacefully with her two daughters [Vanessa and Marianne] holding his hand,” she said.

Loring is best known for her role as the morbid, pigtailed Wednesday in the ABC dark comedy sitcom The Addams Familya role she took on aged six in 1964. She played the character for just two years, but set the pattern for Wednesday’s live performances, and has recently been hailed as a source of inspiration for the interpretation of Jenna Ortega in the hit Netflix series. Wednesday.

Born Lisa Ann DeCinces on February 16, 1958 in the Marshall Islands, Loring’s parents divorced when she was very young and she later came to live in Los Angeles with her mother. She was given the stage name Lisa Loring and began modeling when she was three years old. His first television appearance was in 1964, in an episode of the NBC medical drama Dr Kildare.

After winning the role of Wednesday in ABC, the MGM-produced live-action television adaptation of Charles Addams New Yorker cartoons, Loring began working on the half-hour comedy series at the age of 5½, revealing in later interviews that she “learned to memorize before she could read” in order to tell her replicas. At fan conventions and in several interviews, Loring has spoken fondly of his time working on The Addams Family. “It was like a real family — you couldn’t have chosen a better cast and a better crew,” Loring revealed in a 2017 YouTube interview at the Monsterpalooza convention. “Carolyn Jones, John Astin – Gomez and Morticia – were like parents to me. They were great.”

Airing at the same time as the equally macabre CBS sitcom The Munsters, The Addams Family ran for two seasons, a total of 64 episodes. Almost all of the original cast were reunited in 1977 for the NBC TV movie Halloween with the new Addams Family.

With Loring’s death, Astin is the last surviving member of the original cast of The Addams Family.

Considered a rising talent, Loring found immediate television work after the end of The Addams Familyand with Astin then co-starred in ABC’s Phyllis Diller-led sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton, playing Susan “Suzy” Pruitt. Both shows shared an executive producer in David Levy. Les Pruitts would only last one season, however, following poor reviews. In 1966, Loring also made an appearance in an episode of The UNCLE’s daughterbut his career stalled for several years thereafter.

In 1973, Loring married for the first time at age 15, marrying her childhood sweetheart Farrell Foumberg. The following year she had her first child, but tragedy befell her when her mother Judith died of chronic alcoholism aged 34.

Loring returned to the game with 1977 Halloween with the New Addams Family and scored appearances on popular network shows fantasy island and Barnabas Jones. In the early 1980s, she had a recurring role on the CBS soap opera As the world turnsplaying the character of Cricket Montgomery.

As her television career drew to a close, Loring appeared in a series of slasher pictures in the late 1980s. She starred in blood frenzy and wild port (both in 1987) and Ice (1988), but the push into feature films was short-lived and a troubled personal life, including a battle with heroin addiction, effectively ended her acting career.

Loring’s first marriage to Foumberg ended in 1974. She then married search tomorrow actor Doug Stevenson in 1981, that relationship ending in divorce two years later. In 1987, she married adult film star Jerry Butler, with her new husband determined to quit pornography. However, Butler’s continued appearances in adult films, in secret without Loring’s knowledge, strained the marriage and they divorced in 1992. She married Graham Rich in 2003 and divorced in 2014.

In addition to her daughters, survivors include her grandchildren, Emiliana and Charles.

Mike Barnes contributed to this story.