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Lisa Loring, the Original Wednesday Addams, Dead at 64

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Lisa Loring, the original Wednesday Addams on The Addams Family sitcom, died after suffering a stroke, according to The Hollywood Reporter. She was 64.

Loring’s daughter, Vanessa Foumberg, confirmed her death, saying, “She went peacefully with both her daughters holding her hands.”

Loring secured the role of Wednesday Addams when she was just six years old in 1964. The character was sweet yet strange, caring for pets like a black widow spider (named Homer) and a lizard (named Lucifer) and playing with her aptly-named headless doll, Marie Antoinette. Wednesday also helped launch a Sixties dance craze with a famous scene in which she taught the Addams family butler, Lurch, how to dance (the move became known as “the Lurch”).

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Though The Addams Family sitcom (which itself was spun off from a series of New Yorker cartoons) ran for just two seasons, ending in 1966, the characters had a long afterlife in pop culture. Wednesday, in particular, has enjoyed a recent resurgence thanks to the Netflix series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega. 

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For Loring, however, Wednesday would be her biggest role. After the series ended, she had a brief stint on Phyllis Diller’s short-lived sitcom, The Pruitts of Southampton, but then stepped away from acting for about a decade. As the Seventies drew to a close, Loring returned to the screen, reprising her role as Wednesday in an Addams Family TV movie while also popping up on TV shows like Fantasy Island and Barnaby Jones.

In the early Eighties, Loring secured a small recurring part on the soap opera As the World Turns. Later in the decade, she appeared in a trio of slasher flicks, Blood Frenzy, Savage Harbor, and Iced. Around this time, Loring also worked in the make-up department on a handful of adult films, which is how she met her third husband, the porn star Jerry Butler. The pair’s marriage was tumultuous, as Butler struggled to leave the industry and even started participating in shoots secretly. 

Loring also spent several years battling addiction, and though she would get sober, her acting career effectively ended. Later in life, though, she would regularly pop up at fan conventions and happily talk about her experiences on The Addams Family. She even took roles in some b-level horror flicks in the mid-2010s.

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