The Addams Family ran for the same two seasons as the similarly themed "supernatural sitcom The Munsters. Loring recalls a retrospective interview from when she was a teenager where she compared the humour of the two shows, saying The Addams Family was more sophisticated, like the Marx Brothers and The Munsters was more slapstick, like The Three Stooges

"John Astin [who played Gomez Addams] said, 'Who told you you that? How would you know that?'", she says. The theory was, in fact, her own - as a child she hadn't known that the sitcom's producer, and head writer, Nat Perrin, had worked with the Marx Brothers and was a longtime friend of Groucho Marx.

Loring didn't have too many acting credits as a five-year-old when her mother took her to audition for The Addams Family. She was chosen instead of a 13-year-old who auditioned because, she was later, told. she looked like Carolyn Jones, who played Morticia.

:"I learned to memorise before I could read," Loring says of learning lines.

She has fond memories of working on the show and of her fellow major cast members, all of whom except for Astin and Felix Silla (Cousin Itt) have died - even Ken Weatherwax, who played Wednesday's brother Puggsley, who died in 2014 at the age of 59.

Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch, she remembers as being "very sweet" and frustrated". A Julliard-trained classical actor, he found it hard to get work because of his size. Jackie Coogan, who played Uncle Fester, offered a salutary lesson. As a child star. he acted with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid (1921), among other roles and earned millions of dollars but when he tried to claim it on turning 21, discovered almost all of it had been spent by his mother and stepfather. This eventually led to legislation specifying that a percentage of a child actor's earnings had to be placed in trust but Loring, who was a beneficiary of this, says it wasn't all that much, especially after taxes, agents' fees and living expenses were deducted.

Her mother died when she was 14 and she got married a year later. The marriage didn't last long but produced a daughter and she had a second marriage that lasted five years and produced another child and a third marriage she calls "the biggest mistake of my life": her husband was acting in pornography and she didn't approve of it.

"I would not be involved with someone who did that ... he was going behind my back and lying to me: that was it."

Loring married a fourth time with less drama. She says she is still on good terms with all her former husbands except the third one, with whom she doesn't speak.

She also continued acting, appearing in the soap opera As The World Turns as Cricket Montgomery and various movies, although in recent years there's been less of that and more appearing at conventions and other such nostalgia-related events which have helped her understand her place in the pop-culture pantheon.

"I do autograph shows all over the USA," she says.

"It's a very different life," she says, repeating that it seems "surreal" - for example, learning that a clip of Wednesday and Lurch on YouTube has more than seven million hits.

One place she hasn't been to is Australia - but Astin, with whom she is still friends and from whom she says she has learned a lot, has. She says she hopes to follow his lead and come out here.