1. Charles Samuel Addams was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters.
21 Facts About Charles Addams
1. 2.
Charles Addams was the son of Grace M and Charles Huey Addams, a piano company executive who had studied to be an architect.
3.
College Hall, the oldest building on the current campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where Charles Addams studied, was an inspiration for the mansion.
4.
Charles Addams's father encouraged him to draw, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School yearbook, Weathervane.
5.
Charles Addams attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1930 and 1931.
6.
Charles Addams then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932.
7.
Charles Addams joined the layout department of True Detective magazine in 1933, where he retouched photos of corpses to remove the blood for appearance alongside magazine stories.
8.
Charles Addams created a 1952 mural for the library at Penn State depicting prominent Charles Addams Family members.
9.
Charles Addams gave his characters names as well as qualities for actors to use in portrayals; the series ran on ABC from 1964 to 1966.
10.
Charles Addams regularly had cartoons in The New Yorker, and he created the syndicated single-panel comic Out of This World between 1955 and 1957.
11.
Charles Addams drew more than 1,300 cartoons over the course of his life.
12.
The 1957 album Ghost Ballads, featuring folk songs with supernatural themes by singer-guitarist Dean Gitter, was packaged with cover art by Charles Addams depicting a haunted house.
13.
In 1946, Charles Addams met science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury after having drawn an illustration for Mademoiselle magazine's publication of Bradbury's short story "Homecoming", the first in a series of tales chronicling a family of Illinois vampires named the Elliotts.
14.
Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock was a friend of Charles Addams, and owned two pieces of original Charles Addams art.
15.
Charles Addams met first wife Barbara Jean Day in late 1943, who purportedly resembled his cartoon character Morticia Charles Addams.
16.
The marriage ended eight years later after Charles Addams declined to have children.
17.
Figuratively a "ladykiller", Charles Addams accompanied women such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions.
18.
Charles Addams married his third and final wife Marilyn Matthews Miller, best known as "Tee", in a pet cemetery.
19.
Charles Addams died on September 29,1988, at the age of 76, at St Clare's Hospital and Health Center in New York City, having suffered a heart attack after parking his automobile.
20.
Charles Addams was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2020.
21.
Charles Addams provided the cover art for such books as The Compleat Practical Joker by H Allen Smith and Here at The New Yorker by Brendan Gill.