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Lurch helped Ted Cassidy embrace his massive height
At the age of 11, the actor was already 6 feet tall. It wasn’t until he entered the Addams Family mansion that he got over his towering insecurities.
We're used to seeing Lurch on The Addams Family opening doors, uttering "Uhhh" and declaring in a booming tone, "You rang?"
"My mother can't believe it's my voice," Ted Cassidy told The Daily News in 1965. "But it is. I just deepen it a bit."
But in The Addams Family episode "Lurch's Grand Romance," we watched the six-foot-nine butler attempt to woo one of Morticia's friends Tiny Trivia, and this showed a different side of Lurch.
Here, instead of lumbering from door to door as ordered, he’s attempting to learn modern dance and even spend a scene serenading the apple of his eye.
For Cassidy, playing Lurch could almost be described as an impulse. He'd moved his family to Hollywood to try acting, thinking he'd make a good heavy, and he was so green, he made his own film reel on his own to audition for The Addams Family.
"It's all like a wild fairy story to me, the way I am suddenly on a national show, when I had almost no acting experience," Cassidy told the Oakland Tribune in 1964.
As a boy growing up, Cassidy didn't love being the tallest kid on his block.
In fact, he said he was ashamed of his great height and had no idea how he got to be so tall. His dad was 5'9" and his mom 5'8"!
He felt very alone, and he began walking about with his head in the clouds.
"I even hated to go to school," Cassidy said. "I was actually ashamed of being so much bigger than the other kids. And I was awkward. At the age of 11, I was a six-footer and tripping over my own feet. I had a miserable, unhappy childhood and wouldn’t go through it again for anything in the world."
By the time he got cast as Lurch, Cassidy had come to terms with his freakish stature, and of course, he credited his extraordinary height for landing him the role.
"They were looking for someone to play the butler’s role who was hulking and ungainly," Cassidy said. "I guess they figured I measured up to the description."
When playing the towering butler, Cassidy naturally had his own perspective on the character.
"I tried to arrive at an intellectual concept of Lurch," Cassidy said. "Inside, he's a gentle man. Like Frankenstein was gentle. As our director said, the Addams all have navels. That means we're not monsters, you know — we don't crawl out from under a fog. We're just a peaceful family, and we don't seem peculiar to ourselves."
But that didn't mean fans saw Lurch the same way, and it made meeting fans in the real world slightly uncomfortable for Cassidy, who was forever seen as Lurch from that point on, one and the same person.
"I can see it in their eyes that they think I'm dim-witted and sluggish," Cassidy said. "They look at me as if I were a circus giant and talk to me in condescending tones. It makes me very antagonistic toward them right at the start."
At home, though, Cassidy's kids could certainly tell the difference between Lurch the Butler and Cassidy the father.
"When they watch The Addams Family, my kids look on Lurch as something made of celluloid," Cassidy said. "He’s make-believe. My daughter, Cameron, will say to me, 'Look! Lurch is doing so-and-so.' To her, Lurch is strictly a TV character; I’m her Daddy."
It took him more than half his life to accept that being 6'9" was a positive quality after all. That didn’t mean he wouldn't shave off a couple of inches if given the chance, though.
"I'm extremely pleased about my height," Cassidy said in 1965. "Though if I took a hardnosed view of the matter, the ideal size would be 6'6"."
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Gene Roddenberry cast him in the futuristic science-fiction TV pilot movies "Genesis II," which was followed by "Planet Earth." GII garnered interest by the network but they wanted to see a second pilot of the same concept of a post-apocalyptic earth that was starting to revive from war.
The pilot was not picked up which was a shame as it had tremendous potential.
Ted would have been a regular cast member; an American-Indian named Isiah.
Even then Ted was somewhat typecast. Isiah was played just like Indians were in countless western films and television series. He was stoic, talked little, and had a serious & grim expression.
I always wondered why? Why couldn't he have played as a regular person who spoke with the best of 'em, was expressive, had humor?
And the bigger the brain the larger the intelligence!!
Case closed
That quote's pretty sad. I could maybe understand a very young child not knowing the difference between an actor and a fictional character. If you're older and you still approach the actor and think he's going to be exactly like his tv character, yeah, that's just sad you can't tell real from fiction. I hope he met some fans that could tell the difference between real and fake.
Happens to a lot of actors, unfortunately. Of course, with his size being such a big part of not only his characters but also his real life, it was probably doubly harder if not impossible to distance himself from the characters he played. Other actors could change their hairstyle, their clothes, etc. You can't change your height.
I have an MD and a Masters of public health and I'm one of the top public health physicians in the state.
Here in West Virginia, we celebrate "Lurch Fest" in Princeton West Virginia every single year. We are proud to call him a fellow West Virginia.
And him wanting to be a few inches shorter is no surprise. We don't fit into sports cars. We don't even fit into regular cars very well. I pretty much have to own a pick up truck.
My son just turned 13 and is 6 feet tall. he's going to have to face some of the same stuff.
I understand he also had a giant heart as well.
"Cassidy underwent surgery at St. Vincent Joseph Medical Center in Los Angeles to have a benign tumor removed from his heart. The tumor had formed as a result of the long-term effects of the condition acromegaly, which was also responsible for his iconic deep voice, facial structure, and overall tall stature. Complications arose several days later while he was recuperating at home. He was readmitted to the same hospital, where he died on January 16, 1979, at age 46. He was cremated and his ashes were buried in his backyard."
And not everyone over 6'5" has a genetic/medical condition.
I will say that a kindhearted six-foot 10 inch orthopedic surgeon did something for me in med school I'll never forget. He went into his personal collection and got me some extra extra tall scrubs to wear in the hospital. He said something like… "Us tall guys have to stick together" , and then smiled. I'd never met the guy before.
