‘An icon for goth girls everywhere’ – thank you, Lisa Loring, for making Wednesday Addams great

There have been many incarnations of Wednesday Addams since Charles Addams first published The Addams Family cartoons in the New Yorker. In those first cartoons, she never even had a name. It was not until five-year-old Lisa Loring played the role in the 1964 series that Charles Addams christened the little girl Wednesday. Taking the name from the Monday’s Child nursery rhyme, Loring became Gomez and Morticia’s daughter who was “full of woe”. The character, complete with her signature two long braids, black dress and crisp white collar, became an icon for goth girls everywhere. Loring’s Wednesday always seemed wise beyond her years and cool in the face of all the spooky happenings in the Addams’ mansion, creating the lovable morbid character who would capture the cultural imagination beyond any other family member. To this day, Wednesday Addams, and Loring’s performance, is beloved by horror nerds, classic comedy fans and generations of women who grew up empowered by a character so unashamedly marching to the beat of her own drum.

The original show was shot in black and white and only ran for two seasons, but it came to be regarded as a classic TV sitcom that balanced zany slapstick with political satire. Creator David Levy kept the heart of the cartoon, with Wednesday and her family being spooky oddballs but ultimately a loving family. The show’s 64 episodes aired on ABC in the US and ITV in the UK, but syndication means reruns are still being broadcast today.

Loring’s spell on the sitcom would end with its cancellation in 1966, but she returned in Technicolor alongside the original cast for a 1977 Halloween special TV film. Now a teenager, but still in the same pigtails and black dress, she brought a surly new monotone to Wednesday, while still making her innately lovable. Those signatures would carry forward into the many future iterations of the character in films, cartoons, on Broadway and most recently, in Netflix’s hit series where Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday took centre stage.

Perhaps most famous, though, would be Christina Ricci, who had an uncanny resemblance to Loring in the 1991 film The Addams Family and 1993’s Addams Family Values. At 11 and 13 in the films, Ricci’s Wednesday was a little older than Loring’s but had the same precocious demeanour and steely deadpan delivery. In recognition of Loring’s defining performance, the Netflix show included a dance Ortega has said was an opportunity to pay “homage to Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday Addams” and tweeted her thanks to the star. The dance, in which Ortega cuts a series of unexpected shapes on the dancefloor, went viral. Ortega does the same spirited shuffle Loring did in the sitcom episodes Lurch Learns to Dance and Lurch’s Grand Romance, where she danced with wild, idiosyncratic abandon.

In the decades that followed, Loring appeared in a series of sitcoms, soaps and the occasional slasher film but never secured another part as iconic as Wednesday Addams. While no longer in the limelight, she raised two daughters who were by her bedside this week after a stroke that proved fatal. She gave very few interviews, but she embraced the enduring legacy of her character, reuniting with her fellow Addams family cast members for the 2006 DVD release of the series, and was a regular at conventions and fan events where she would do meet-and-greets and sign Addams Family merchandise.

Now, after her death at the age of 64, the only living member of that Addams family is John Astin, who played her father, Gomez Addams. But the legacy of the show about lovable outsiders continues, and the reruns show they have not lost their charm. The finger snaps in the theme tune, the Groucho Marx-esque wit and the subversive look at US family values have not dulled with time. And Loring in pigtails is still giving other girls permission to embrace their spooky sides, celebrate what makes them different and dance like no one is watching.