With Tim Burton’s mystery series “Wednesday” on Netflix, the Addams Family is currently on everyone’s lips again. Jenna Ortega is just one of many actresses to have played the iconic creepy brat Wednesday over the years – the very first actress to play the part was Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday on the cult series The Addams Family from 1964-1966. Unlike Loring’s daughter Vanessa Foumberg confirmed, Lisa Loring died on January 28, 2023 due to a stroke. The actress turned 64 years old.
Lisa Loring was born on February 16, 1958. She burst into the limelight as a young child, starting modeling at the age of three and having her first acting role in an episode of “Stationsarzt Dr. Kildare” with Richard Chamberlain. At the age of six, she took on the role of Wednesday Addams in the darkly humorous sitcom The Addams Family, the first film adaptation of the Charles Addams cartoons of the 1930s. The series ran from 1964 to 1966. Lisa Loring reprized the role of Wednesday in the 1977 TV movie Halloween With The New Addams Family.
Immediately following The Addams Family, Loring took on another role as a child actress in 1966, appearing in the sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton. As a young adult, she played minor roles on television series such as Fantasy Island and Barnaby Jones before landing the recurring role of Cricket Montgomery on the soap opera Young and Passionate in the 1980s.
Roles in horror films and the “Wednesday dance”
After that, she mainly starred in smaller horror films, including Blood Frenzy (1987), Iced (1989) and Way Down in Chinatown (2014). Her last role was in the 2015 horror comedy Doctor Spine.
Lisa Loring’s performance as Wednesday Addams was only recently brought back into the public eye. Her famous ‘Wednesday Dance’ from the 1960s TV series was picked up by Jenna Ortega on the Netflix hit series Wednesday – Ortega incorporated elements of her predecessor’s dance into her own ‘Wednesday Dance’. The dance scene went viral and was massively imitated on TikTok.