John Astin

Astin's first film credit is an uncredited one: Glad Hand, the hopeless dance chaperone in West Side Story. A year later he had a named part in That Touch of Mink, and in 1964 came the role that fixed him in place for the next sixty years, Gomez Addams.

The Addams Family ran from 1964 to 1966 and has never stopped playing since. What Astin brought to Gomez was appetite. Most sitcom husbands of the period were exasperated; his was delighted by everything, his wife above all, and he played the delight completely straight, which is why the character outlived the show that made it.

He kept returning to it, as a voice in a Scooby-Doo crossover in 1972 and again in the animated Addams Family of 1992. In between, and for decades afterwards, he did what character actors do, which is turn up: a dean in Teen Wolf Too, the mad scientist Professor Gangreen in Return of the Killer Tomatoes, a janitor in Gremlins 2, a judge in The Frighteners, Radford in Eerie, Indiana, Professor Wickwire in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The voice work runs just as deep, from Bull Gator in Taz-Mania to Superintendent Skinner in Recess to Duckman.

The credits here run from 1961 to a Killer Tomatoes revival slated for 2026, where he is billed as Professor Gangreen again, thirty-eight years after the first one. Not many careers are that shape.