Long before Jenna Ortega put on the costume of Wednesday in the Netflix series, it was actress Lisa Loring who played the daughter of the Addams family for the first time, in the famous series broadcast from 1964 to 1966. she became?
Born under the pencil of Charles Addams in the New Yorker comic strips, the characters of the family that will bear his name will come to life for the first time in a cult series, broadcast on ABC between September 18, 1964 and April 8, 1966.
A show which moreover owed its existence to a desire for the channel to compete with Les Monstres, which CBS was then preparing.
With great reinforcements of black humor and macabre gags, thanks to its main actors, John Astin in the role of Gomez and Carolyn Jones in that of Morticia, the series, although ultimately short, marked the history of the small screen. Among the revelations was Lisa Loring, who played, years before Jenna Ortega, the very first Wednesday.
Born in 1958 in the Marshall Islands, Lisa began her career as a child model in 1961. Her very first role was in an episode of the medical drama Dr Kildare in 1964. It was with her role as Wednesday in The Addams Family, in at the age of six, she got her first recurring role.
The rest of his career is very sparse. In 1966, she played the daughter of a wealthy family living on Long Island in The Pruitts of Southampton, which only lasted one season. The same year, she obtained a role in Annie, very special agent, a spin-off of the series Very special agents.
American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
It will be necessary to wait a hiatus of ten years before she returns in front of the cameras, thanks to a TV movie where she resumes her role of Wednesday, obviously older, in The Addams family: it’s the party, broadcast for Halloween parties in 1977.
We can still include a handful of roles, such as in The Fantastic Island, the time of an episode, or the soap As the World Turns, where she appears in seven episodes, between 1980 and 1983.
His last roles, anecdotal, appear in two horror feature films, respectively released in 2014 and 2015 and completely new to us: Way Down in Chinatown and Doctor Spine.
An artistic career dotted with many air holes and chaotic. Which is also explained by many vicissitudes on a personal level. Married in 1973 at the age of 15 with her boyfriend at the time, Farrell Foumberg, she gave birth the following year to a daughter… and divorced the same year.
A year all the more disastrous as she also lost her mother, aged 34, to complications related to her alcoholism.
Convolant in second wedding with the actor of soap Doug Stevenson in 1983, this second marriage will not hold any more. Her third marriage, in 1987, was to a porn actor, Jerry Butler, whom she had met while he was shooting a movie in 1986 with then-X star Traci Lords.
Lisa Loring also participated in the script for this film, although she is not credited in the credits. Their relationship, very stormy and toxic, will also be right for the couple: they divorced in 1992. Jerry Butler will also die in 2018, at the age of 58.
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Lisa Loring and Jerry Butler on the set of a TV show in 1992.
In the early 1990s, Lisa Loring was at rock bottom. Suffering from severe depression, she immersed herself in drugs and drugs, especially the heroine.
In 1991, she made an atrocious discovery which led to a suicide attempt on her part: she found, hanged, the body of her friend, Kelly Van Dyke, porn actress, daughter of actor Jerry Van Dyke and niece of Dick van Dyke, the famous actor of Mary Poppins.
Entering intensive care to get rid of her addictions, Lisa Loring has put her career in the industry on hold. In 2003, she married for the fourth time. This new union will last longer than the others, but ends there too in a divorce, in 2014.
Lisa Loring, however, has not been forgotten. By her fans, already, whom she gladly meets at conventions. But also by Jenna Ortega, who paid tribute to him on social networks, in the wake of his now famous dance scene.
In The Addams Family series, there is indeed a memorable scene in which Wednesday talks and dances with Frankenstein butler Lurch, played by actor Ted Cassidy. Like a beautiful echo and transmission of witness, 57 years later.