Lisa Loring, the actress who played Wednesday Addams in the classic TV adaptation of The Addams Family, has died. She was 64.
Loring died Saturday night at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank from complications from a stroke caused by high blood pressure, her daughter Vanessa Foumberg told .
“She left peacefully with her two daughters [Vanessa and Marianne] hold their hands,” she said.
Loring is best known for her role as the morbid Wednesday with pigtails on ABC’s black comedy sitcom The Addams Family, a role she took on in 1964 at the age of six. She only played the character for two years, but provided the inspiration for it in Wednesday’s live-action performances and was recently hailed as the inspiration for Jenna Ortega’s rendition of the hit Netflix series Wednesday.
Born Lisa Ann DeCinces on February 16, 1958 in the Marshall Islands, Loring divorced her parents when she was very young and later moved to live with her mother in Los Angeles. She was given the stage name Lisa Loring and began modeling at the age of three. She made her television debut in a 1964 episode of the medical drama Dr. Kildare from NBC.
After winning the role of Wednesday in ABC’s MGM-produced live-action television adaptation of Charles Addams New York cartoons, Loring began work on the half-hour comedy series at age 5.5 and revealed in later ones Interviews that she “learned to memorize before I could read” to say her lines. At fan conventions and in several interviews, Loring has spoken affectionately about her time working on The Addams Family. “It was like real family – you couldn’t have picked a better cast and crew,” Loring revealed in a 2017 YouTube interview conducted 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 CBS’ similarly macabre sitcom The Munsters, The Addams Family ran for two seasons with a total of 64 episodes. Almost all of the original cast reunited with the New Addams Family in the 1977 NBC TV movie Halloween.
With Loring’s death, Astin is the last surviving member of the original cast of The Addams Family.
Loring is considered an up-and-coming talent and immediately found work in television after The Addams Family ended. He co-starred with Astin on the ABC sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton, directed by Phyllis Diller, playing Susan “Suzy” Pruitt. Both series shared an executive producer with David Levy. However, the Pruitts would only last one season after bad reviews. Loring also appeared in an episode of The Girl from UNCLE in 1966, but her career stalled for a few years after that.
In 1973, at the age of 15, Loring was married for the first time, marrying her childhood sweetheart Farrell Foumberg. She had her first child the following year, but tragedy struck when her mother, Judith, died of chronic alcoholism at the age of 34.
Loring returned to acting with Halloween with the New Addams Family in 1977 and has appeared on the popular television shows Fantasy Island and Barnaby Jones. In the early 1980s, she had a recurring role on the CBS soap As the World Turns, playing the character of Cricket Montgomery.
With her television career ending, Loring appeared in a series of slasher pictures in the late 1980s. She acted in Blood Frenzy and Savage Harbor (both 1987) and Iced (1988), but her foray into feature films was short-lived and a difficult 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 for Tomorrow actor Doug Stevenson in 1981, and that relationship ended in divorce two years later. In 1987, she married adult film star Jerry Butler, and her new husband pledged to quit pornography. However, Butler’s continued appearances in adult films, in secret without Loring’s knowledge, proved to be a great strain on the marriage, and they divorced in 1992. She married Graham Rich in 2003 and divorced him in 2014.
In addition to her daughters, survivors include her grandchildren Emiliana and Charles.
Mike Barnes contributed to this story.