Cartoonist Charles Samuel Addams gave his character Wednesday six toes on one foot – and a taste for the macabre. She was a teenager who reflected some of his own morbid, mischievous traits. As a young boy, Addams frequently went to the basement of his New Jersey home, climbed inside the dumbwaiter and stealthily hauled himself up to his Grandma Spear’s bedroom floor before leaping out as she went to open the serving doors on the hatch. “I’d scare the wits out of her,” he later recalled about the woman who became the model for the good humoured witch Granny Frump in The Addams Family.

Addams described Wednesday as “a solemn child, prim in dress and, on the whole, pretty lost” and although Tim Burton also recognised in her the soul of “a classic outcast”, the director has reinvented her as a spiky, empowered 21^st-century protagonist in his new Netflix comedy-horror series Wednesday. Addams who was born on January 7 1912, often remarked drolly that “I am one of those strange people who actually had a happy childhood”.

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His contended upbringing in Westfield, where both his father Charles Huey and mother Grace encouraged a love of drawing. They did little to deter him from being “a bit of a rascal”, however. At eight, the boy known locally as Chill was caught breaking into a house on Dudley Avenue and drawing skeletons all over the walls. His parents paid a fine for criminal damages. “It wasn’t really an arrest but I liked to think of it as one,” Addams recalled.

Read more: The Telegraph