Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday Addams in the first movie version of “The Addams Family,” died of a stroke at the age of 64.
Loring died Saturday night in a hospital, where her family was with her, her daughter told the magazine Variety.
“She went peacefully with her hands held by both of her daughters,” she said.
Loring’s friend, the author Laurie Jacobson, wrote on Facebook that Loring had “suffered a massive stroke caused by smoking and high blood pressure” and had been on life support for three days before her family decided to turn it off over the weekend.
Jacobson wrote about Loring’s “legacy in the world of entertainment”: “She is woven into the fabric of pop culture and will always be Wednesday Addams in our hearts.”
When she was only five years old, Loring played Wednesday Addams in the first movie based on Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons. The film ran from 1964 to 1966.
Her role as the macabre Addams’s daughter, with her gothic style and classic pigtails, has had a big impact on how the character has been portrayed in movies and TV shows since.
A viral dance was made after Jenna Ortega’s version of Loring on Netflix, which was based on her angular moves in the original series. When the dance went viral on the Internet, Ortega thanked Loring.
Thanks to Siouxsie Sioux, Bob Fosse’s Rich Man’s Frug, Lisa Loring, Lene Lovich, Denis Lavant, and archival footage of goths dancing in clubs in the 80’s. Helped me out on this one. https://t.co/zlxlv1JUW4
— Jenna Ortega (@jennaortega) November 25, 2022
Lisa Ann DeCinces was born in the Marshall Islands in 1958. She then moved with her mother to Hawaii and then to Los Angeles. She started modeling when she was three, and her first role on TV was in the medical drama Dr. Kildare not long after that.
After she became famous as Wednesday Addams, she acted in The Pruitts of Southampton and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. before getting a recurring role on the long-running daytime soap As the World Turns.
In the late 1980s, she was also in a number of slasher movies, such as Blood Frenzy, Iced, and Savage Harbor.
During the same time, she worked as a makeup artist on the set of the adult film Traci’s Big Trick, where she met her third husband, adult film actor Jerry Butler.
Her marriage to Butler got a lot of attention from the media, and the couple had several public fights because Loring didn’t like that Butler kept working in the adult film industry. In 1992, they finally split up.
Loring’s daughters, Marianne and Vanessa, and her grandchildren, Emiliana and Charles, are the only people who will remember her.
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