The Addams Family Put Anjelica Huston Through Intense And Restrictive Conditions

Charles Addams' very first strip in what might be considered the Addams Family series ran on August 6, 1938 in the pages of the New Yorker. The strip features a large, bearded, brutish man — clearly designed after Boris Karloff's character in "The Old Dark House" — standing next to a whip-thin, vampiric woman in a slinky black dress. That same woman would later appear in additional "haunted house" strips standing next to a new husband — a squat creeper in a suit — as well her two dreadful children. Also part of the "family" were a witch-like grandmother, a bald, grinning weirdo, and a towering, Frankensteinian butler. These characters didn't have names, so readers merely referred to them as the Addams Family. 

When the strips were adapted into a TV sitcom in 1964, the vampire woman was finally given a name: Morticia Addams. She and her husband Gomez were really into each other, constantly flirting and implying they still engaged in zesty, exciting sexual activities. That chemistry was exploited deeply in Barry Sonnenfeld's 1991 film adaptation of "The Addams Family," starring Raul Julia as Gomez and Anjelica Huston as Morticia. He was dashing in a suit. She was pale white and sported claw-like fingernails. 

The fun thing about the Addams Family is that they are completely happy and unaffected by stress. They are a loving, understanding family that supports each of its members. They just happen to be haunted house ghouls that regularly commit murder and take a great sadistic pleasure in harming others. Recall that Sonnenfeld's film begins with the Addams Family pouring molten lead on itinerant Christmas carolers. 

In 2018, Huston spoke to the Guardian about her Morticia costume, and how the makeup and the facial appliances she had to wear were terribly uncomfortable.

Morticia was traditionally dressed in a form-fitting, black gown. Director Sonnenfeld wasn't about to change her signature look, and outfitted Huston with a satin dress that, the actress revealed, wasn't easy to move in. It incorporated a corset, which doesn't exactly allow a performer to bend, sit, or move easily. What's more, Huston was given a long black wig, outsize false eyelashes, and extra-long stick-on fingernails, all adding to Morticia's vampire-like visage. 

To give her face a gaunt, skeletal look, Huston was also outfitted with, essentially, "face suspenders," which adhered to her temples and were pulled back behind the back of her skull. Those changed the shape of her eyes slightly, and made her already notable cheekbones stand out. About the makeup, Huston said: 

"I've never really liked looking normal, and I've always liked a faintly bleached out look, so I was really happy about the way the cameraman lit me as Morticia. The makeup was very intense. I had stickers attached to my temples; rubber bands that met behind my head and then on top of that the wig, fake nails and eyelashes and the corset ... individually they add up to something monumental."

It was, however, difficult to move around in such an outfit. Luckily, Huston felt, that was a great way to inform the character. She continued:

"It was hard to move. There were certain things one could do with one's hands but that was about it. Fortunately I wanted to keep Morticia very iconic and still. She's not fractious at all. She's very settled in her body language."

One might note that Morticia isn't a very active character. It seems that was by necessity. 

Morticia's stillness would eventually become a comic affectation until itself. In Sonnenfeld's 1993 sequel "Addams Family Values," Morticia would give birth to a new child, Pubert. In the hospital, as she went into labor, Morticia was a stoic as ever. The pain, she said, was exquisite. She didn't scream, sweat, or seem to be struggling at all. This was a comic counterpoint to the active, sweaty birth scenes one ordinarily sees in movies. 

Huston may have liked her look, but she did hate the makeup. She said that at the end of the shoot, she destroyed all the appliances. "I had a bonfire of the vanities at the end of the movie," she said, "where I took all the fake stuff, made a pile and set it on fire."

This falls in line with other notorious stories one might hear about actors burning makeup or costumes they notoriously hated. There were rumors for years that actress Jeri Ryan burned the corset she had to wear while filming "Star Trek: Voyager" in the 1990s. That turned out to be untrue, as Paramount wouldn't give her the costume when shooting wrapped. More likely is the story that actor George Reeves burned his Superman costume after "The Adventures of Superman" was canceled in 1958. Although popular, Reeves famously hated playing Superman, feeling it wasn't an interesting acting opportunity. The story goes that a friend came over after the cancelation to find Reeve cooking his Superman costume on a grill. He was finally free of it. 

Huston, however, is the only confirmed story of these three.