“She left in peace with her two daughters holding hands,” Foumberg said. Laurie Jacobson, a friend of Loring’s, also shared the details of her death on her Facebook, mentioning that she had “suffered a massive stroke caused by smoking and high blood pressure.”
“I had been on life support for 3 days. Yesterday her family made the difficult decision to remove it and she passed away last night,” Jacobson said. “She will be embedded in the tapestry that is pop culture and in our hearts forever as Merlina Addams.”
(Lawrence Lucier/Getty Images)
Following this news, fans took to social media in droves to pay tribute, with one follower tweeting: “Goodbye to Lisa Loring, the person who DEFINED Wednesday Addams at a time when she was just a drawing of newspaper with a frown.
Loring was the blueprint for the pale, pigtailed “Merlina” after being cast in the sitcom The Addams Family released in 1964. She took the role when she was just six years old and played the character with the dark obsession with death until the show ended two years later.
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In 1977, he appeared as “Wednesday Sr.” in the tv movie Halloween with the New Addams Family.
The hard, almost deadpan expression of Loring’s character, inspired by the Charles Addams cartoons published in the New Yorkerpaved the acting and creative path for other actresses, such as Christina Ricci, who played Merlina in the 1991 hit film The Addams Family and its sequel, Addams Family Values.
Jenna Ortega commented that her version of the pop culture icon was also inspired by Loring, after the premiere of merlinthe successful version that Netflix presented in 2022, directed by Tim Burton.
“I paid tribute to Lisa Loring, the first Wednesday Addams. I did a bit of the walking that she does,” Ortega said during an interview on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last December.