John Astin turns 96 years old today. He was born on 30 March 1930.
Everyone knows him for The Addams Family TV series. And shockingly, he is the last surviving actor in the main cast — after the early death of Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday Addams. He really does define the character of Gomez Addams going forward. While in the comics, he was more of a general conniving weirdo. But the TV show turned him into more of a Latin Lover weirdo. It’s a more compelling character — and very typical of the actor.
John Astin has had a great career, even outside of The Addams Family. For one thing, in the 1970s and 1980s, he directed a lot of TV. That included some Night Gallery episodes: “The House,” “A Fear of Spiders,” and “The Dark Boy.” The first of these is probably my favorite episode of the series. It haunted me for many years after seeing it as a kid. It still gives me goosebumps to think about it even today.
Astin also starred in three episodes of the show. Interestingly, he didn’t star in any of them (as was common among actors turned directors). He starred in two where (“Pamela’s Voice” and “Hell’s Bells”) he’s in Hell. And he has a small role in the excellent “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.”
But as an actor, he got his first big break as the lead in I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster. It was one of those shows that probably would have been a big hit had it not been cancelled just as it started to gain an audience. Two years later, he created the role of Gomez on The Addams Family.
Despite creating such an iconic character, John Astin has largely not been typecast. He has played a wide variety of roles since then. He starred in Operation Petticoat in the mid-1970s. But mostly, he played guest roles on TV shows. And, of course, he played Professor Mortimer Gangreen in all the Killer Tomatoes films except the first. Here are links to all the films (except the last):
- Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988)
- Killer Tomatoes Strike Back (1990)
- Killer Tomatoes Eat France (1991)
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Organic Intelligence (2026).
But I’ll just embed the first episode of The Addams Family here:
Carolun Jones and John Astin via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
