Lisa Rowling, the actress who played Wednesday Addams in the classic TV adaptation of The Addams Family, has died.
Loring died Saturday night at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank from complications of a stroke caused by high blood pressure, his daughter Vanessa Foumberg told The Hollywood Reporter.
“She lived peacefully with her two daughters [Vanessa and Marianne] Hold my hand,” she said.
Loring is best known for playing Morbid Pig Tail Wednesday on ABC’s black comedy The Addams Family in 1964. And it was recently hailed as the inspiration for Jenna Ortega’s interpretation on Wednesday’s hit Netflix series.
Born Lisa Ann Desynethes on February 16, 1958 in the Marshall Islands, Rowling’s parents divorced when Rowling was a young child, and she went to live with her mother in Los Angeles. She was given her stage name Lisa Rowling and she began modeling at the age of three. Her first television appearance was in 1964 in an episode of her NBC medical drama Her Dr. Kildare.
After winning the role of ABC Wednesday in the MGM-produced live-action television adaptation of Charles Adams’ New Yorker cartoon, Rowling began working on the 30-minute comedy series at the age of five and a half, and in a later interview said she “learned to say her lines.
At fan conventions and in several interviews, Rowling spoke fondly of her time working on The Addams Family. I did,” Rowling 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 alongside CBS’ equally creepy sitcom The Munsters, The Addams Family aired for two seasons and a total of 64 episodes. Almost all of the original cast reunited in 1977 for his NBC television movie, Halloween with the New Addams Family.
With Rowling’s death, Astin is the last surviving member of the original cast of The Addams Family.
Considered a rising talent, Rowling found television work soon after the Addams Family’s demise, co-starring alongside Astin in ABC’s Phyllis Diller-led sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton, playing Susan “Susie” Pruitt. I was. Both shows shared executive David Levy his producer. However, due to poor reviews, Pruitt lasted only one season. In 1966, Rowling also appeared in an episode of The Girl From UNCLE, but her career stalled for years afterward.
In 1973, Rowling married for the first time when she was 15, to her childhood friend Farrell Vonberg. The following year, she had her first child, but her tragedy struck her when her mother Judith died of chronic alcoholism at the age of 34.
Loring returned to acting in Halloween With the New Addams Family and appeared in the popular network shows Fantasy Island and Barnaby Jones. In the early 1980s, she appeared regularly on her CBS soap show As the World Turns, playing cricketer Montgomery.
As her television career came to an end, Rowling appeared in a series of groundbreaking photographs in the late 1980s. She starred in Blood on Her Frenzy and Savage Harbor (both her 1987s) and Iced (1988), but her push for features was short-lived and her troubled personal life, including her battle with heroin, 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, a relationship she divorced two years later. In 1987, she married adult film star Jerry Butler, and her new husband promised to quit pornography. , which proved to be a huge strain on their marriage, divorced in 1992. She married Graham Rich in 2003 and she divorced him in 2014.
In addition to daughters, survivors include grandchildren Emiliana and Charles.
Mike Barnes contributed to this report.
