Lisa Loring

As Wednesday Addams, she lived in an ooky-spooky mansion with the gender-bending Cousin Itt and a disembodied hand for a pet. But if Lisa Loring’s home in The Addams Family (1964-66) was a house of horrors, it didn’t even come close to the traumas of her haunted offscreen life.

In 1974, Loring’s mother, Judith, died of chronic alcoholism at the age of 34. At the time, Loring was 16, already a mother herself to newborn Vanessa and on her way to her first divorce (from childhood sweetheart Farrell Foumberg). Daughter Marianne was Suborn in 1984 during Loring’s second marriage, to actor Doug Stevenson. But it was when her third union, with porn star Paul Siederman, began to founder in 1991 that she turned to drugs and eventually heroin for consolation. That year she discovered the body of her friend Kelly Van Dyke (daughter of actor Jerry), after an apparent suicide by hanging, and tried a deliberate overdose. “I was disillusioned about my adult life,” she says curtly.

Three years ago, Loring went into rehab and beat her addiction. She now has a new beau (sound technician Tim Drury, son of James, star of the 1960s TV series The Virginian) and a job at a Santa Monica interior design firm, the Painted-Lady. After Addams, Loring vowed never to act again, but in 1981 she changed her mind and began a three-year stint as Cricket Montgomery on the soap As the World Turns. Now 37, she graciously praises Addams Family film star Christina Ricci as “a perfect Wednesday” and would like to find a new niche for herself in showbiz. “I’m trying, but I’m afraid of the rejection,” she says, adding that she does have standards. “I will not do any schlock. But I’d love to do a Quentin Tarantino film.”