Gomez Addams
Encyclopedia
Gomez Addams is the fictional patriarch
Patriarch
Originally a patriarch was a man who exercised autocratic authority as a pater familias over an extended family. The system of such rule of families by senior males is called patriarchy. This is a Greek word, a compound of πατριά , "lineage, descent", esp...

 of The Addams Family
The Addams Family
The Addams Family is a group of fictional characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams. As named by Charles Addams, the Addams Family characters include Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing....

, created by cartoonist Charles Addams
Charles Addams
Charles "Chas" Samuel Addams was an American cartoonist known for his particularly black humor and macabre characters...

 for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

magazine in the 1930s.

In the 1960s American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 television series recreation, Gomez was portrayed by John Astin
John Astin
John Allen Astin is an American actor who has appeared in numerous films and television shows, and is best known for the role of Gomez Addams on The Addams Family, and other similarly eccentric comedic characters.-Early years:...

. Astin also voiced the character in an episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies
The New Scooby-Doo Movies
The New Scooby-Doo Movies is the second incarnation of the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. It premiered on September 9, 1972 and ran for two seasons on CBS as the only hour-long Scooby-Doo series...

which featured the family. In the first animated series by Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was an American animation studio that dominated North American television animation during the second half of the 20th century...

, Gomez was voiced by Lennie Weinrib
Lennie Weinrib
Lennie Weinrib was an American actor, voice actor and writer. He is best known for playing the title role in the children's television show H.R...

. In the second animated series, also by Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera
Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was an American animation studio that dominated North American television animation during the second half of the 20th century...

, Gomez's voice was again performed by John Astin.

Gomez was played by Raúl Juliá
Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay was a Puerto Rican actor.Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson...

 in The Addams Family
The Addams Family (film)
The Addams Family is a 1991 American black comedy film based on the characters from the cartoon of the same name created by cartoonist Charles Addams....

(1991
1991 in film
The year 1991 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*April 28 - Bonnie Raitt marries actor Michael O'Keefe in New York* Terminator 2: Judgment Day, became one of the landmarks for science fiction action films with its groundbreaking visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic.*November...

) and Addams Family Values
Addams Family Values
Addams Family Values is a 1993 sequel to the 1991 comedy The Addams Family. The film was written by Paul Rudnick and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and many cast members from the original returned for the sequel, including Raúl Juliá, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci...

(1993
1993 in film
The year 1993 in film involved many significant films, including the blockbuster hits Jurassic Park, The Fugitive and The Firm. -Events:...

). Tim Curry
Tim Curry
Timothy James "Tim" Curry is a British actor, singer, composer and voice actor, known for his work in a diverse range of theatre, film and television productions. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California....

 took up the role in the film Addams Family Reunion
Addams Family Reunion
Addams Family Reunion is a film released straight-to-video in 1998. It was also distributed to television by Fox Family. It is unrelated to the two Paramount films from 1991 and 1993. So far, the film is only available on VHS and has not had a DVD release. It was shot in Los Angeles, California...

in 1998 and in 1999 Gomez was played by Glenn Taranto
Glenn Taranto
Glenn Taranto is an American actor and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his role as Gomez on The New Addams Family....

 in the TV series The New Addams Family
The New Addams Family
The New Addams Family is an American/Canadian sitcom that aired from October 1998 to August 1999 and aired on YTV in Canada and Fox Family in the United States. It was produced by Shavick Entertainment and Saban Entertainment as a new version of the 1960s series The Addams Family.-Synopsis:The new...

. In the Broadway musical
The Addams Family (musical)
The Addams Family is a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa and a book by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. The show is based upon The Addams Family characters created by Charles Addams in his single-panel gag cartoons, which depict a ghoulish American family with an affinity for...

, Gomez was played by Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane
Nathan Lane is an American actor of stage and screen. He is best known for his roles as Mendy in The Lisbon Traviata, Albert in The Birdcage, Max Bialystock in the musical The Producers, Ernie Smuntz in MouseHunt, Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to...

 and was replaced by Roger Rees
Roger Rees
Roger Rees is a Welsh actor. He is best known to American audiences for playing the characters Robin Colcord on the American television sitcom show Cheers and Lord John Marbury on the American television drama The West Wing...

 on March 22.

Name origin and family

In the Charles Addams cartoons, Gomez — as with all of the members of the family — had no given name
Given name
A given name, in Western contexts often referred to as a first name, is a personal name that specifies and differentiates between members of a group of individuals, especially in a family, all of whose members usually share the same family name...

. When the 1964
1964 in television
The year 1964 in television involved some significant events.Below is a list of television-related events in 1964.For the American TV schedule, see: 1964-65 American network television schedule.-Events:...

 television series The Addams Family was being developed, Charles Addams suggested naming the character either Repelli or Gomez. Addams left the final choice up to actor John Astin, who chose Gomez. Gomez is the husband of Morticia Addams
Morticia Addams
Morticia A. Addams is the fictional matriarch of "The Addams Family", created by cartoonist Charles Addams and based on his first wife Barbara .Morticia is the wife of Gomez Addams and mother of Wednesday Addams and Pugsley Addams...

, son (or, in some incarnations of the family, son-in-law) to Grandmama Addams
Grandmama (Addams Family)
Grandmama is a fictional character within The Addams Family, created by cartoonist Charles Addams.Grandmama is the grandmother of the Addams children, Pugsley and Wednesday Addams, although her relationship to the other family members is somewhat inconsistent in the various incarnations of the family...

, nephew-in-law (or sometimes brother) to Uncle Fester
Uncle Fester
Gordon Craven, Uncle Fester, or Fester Addams, is a member of the fictional Addams Family. He was played by Jackie Coogan in the original television series, by Christopher Lloyd in the first two feature films, and by Patrick Thomas in the third, Addams Family Reunion. Finally, Michael Roberds...

, and father to Wednesday
Wednesday Addams
Wednesday Friday Addams is a member of the fictional Addams Family, created by cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker.-Wednesday:In Charles Addams's cartoons, Wednesday and other members of the family had no names...

 and Pugsley
Pugsley Addams
Pugsley Addams is a member of the fictional Addams family, created by cartoonist Charles Addams.Pugsley is the oldest child of Morticia and Gomez Addams. He is a pre-teen boy who is almost always seen wearing a striped T-shirt and shorts...

. Gomez also has a butler named Lurch and a Cousin Itt
Cousin Itt
Cousin Itt is a member of the fictional Addams Family. Unlike the other characters, Cousin Itt was not originally created by cartoonist Charles Addams, but by producer David Levy, though he did appear as an unnamed character in Addams's cartoons.- Character :...

. Gomez's paternal grandfather was Grandpa Squint Addams, who was the son of Pegleg Addams; oddly, Gomez's paternal grandmother was also named Squint.

The name "Gomez" is usually recognized as a family name
Family name
A family name is a type of surname and part of a person's name indicating the family to which the person belongs. The use of family names is widespread in cultures around the world...

 in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

-speaking countries. In Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

, the character's name was changed to "Homero" ("Homer").

Personality

Gomez is of Castilian
Castile (historical region)
A former kingdom, Castile gradually merged with its neighbours to become the Crown of Castile and later the Kingdom of Spain when united with the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Navarre...

 extraction, and almost always dresses in a chalk-striped, dark-colored suit, sports slicked-back hair and a pencil moustache
Pencil moustache
A pencil moustache is a thin moustache found adjacent to, or a little above the lip. The style is neatly clipped, so that the moustache takes the form of a thin line, as if it had been drawn using a pencil. A large gap is left between the nose and the moustache. The line of facial hair either...

. In the television shows, Gomez wore a necktie
Necktie
A necktie is a long piece of cloth worn for decorative purposes around the neck or shoulders, resting under the shirt collar and knotted at the throat. Variants include the ascot tie, bow tie, bolo tie, and the clip-on tie. The modern necktie, ascot, and bow tie are descended from the cravat. Neck...

 to his chalk-stripe suit, though in the films, Gomez wears a bow-tie and seems to enjoy dressing in a wide variety of extravagant clothing. He enjoys smoking cigars, and is an accomplished juggler and knife-thrower
Knife throwing
Knife throwing is an art, sport, combat skill, or variously an entertainment technique, involving an artist skilled in the art of throwing knives, the weapons thrown, and a target.-A throwing knife:...

. He is well-versed in all types of combat (or believes himself to be, at any rate), especially swordfighting. His favorite dance is The Freddie. Though head of the household, he is extremely naïve and childish, with a short attention span and endless optimism. He has a childlike love for toys and is especially fond of setting up head-on collisions between his model trains. As indicative of his playfully eccentric personality, his personal portrait, painted by Morticia, depicts him standing on his head. Gomez is passionately in love with Morticia; he affectionately calls her romantic names like Querida ("darling") and Cara Mia ("my beloved"), and is driven insane with desire by the slightest of her actions, whether imitating animal noises, speaking French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 or calling him "Bubele" (Austro-Bavarian
Austro-Bavarian
Bavarian , also Austro-Bavarian, is a major group of Upper German varieties spoken in the south east of the German language area.-History and origin:...

/Yiddish
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...

: Lit. "little boy"). In The New Addams Family, Gomez also has reactions to Spanish. He also doesn't care who speaks the French, as long as Morticia is there so he can kiss her arm. Like the rest of the family, Gomez is open and friendly to outsiders, though he finds their "normal" lifestyles bizarre.

Charles Addams' description went like this:
Gomez Addams is an athletic, acrobatic, and eccentric multi-billionaire. Though an extremely successful businessman, having acquired much of his wealth through investment
Investment
Investment has different meanings in finance and economics. Finance investment is putting money into something with the expectation of gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for the principal amount, as well as security of return, within an expected period of time...

s, he seems to have little regard for money and will casually spend thousands of dollars on any whimsical endeavor (a fact that often mortifies visitors of the Addams household). Gomez's investments are guided more by whimsy than strategy, yet luck rarely fails him. "It's not for nothing that they call me "The Plunger"," he once boasted, an apparent reference to sticking doggedly with a stock despite low fluctuations, although this nickname was in fact bestowed upon him not by Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 investors but by the Plumbers' Union. According to The New Addams Family, he has 20-20 vision, and the heart of a 20-year-old track star — Mama had performed the surgery herself.

In the original sitcom, Gomez owned businesses around the world, including a crocodile
Crocodile
A crocodile is any species belonging to the family Crocodylidae . The term can also be used more loosely to include all extant members of the order Crocodilia: i.e...

 farm ("Crocodiles Unlimited"), a buzzard farm, a salt mine, a tombstone factory, a uranium mine, and many others. It was not unheard of for him to simply forget that he owned a controlling interest in a business or to draw a check on the wrong bank. Guinness World Records 2008 ranked him as 5th richest TV character with a net worth of $8.2 million. Forbes
Forbes
Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

 lists him as worth much higher; in their 2007 "Fictional 15" list of the richest fictional characters, he was ranked #12 with a net worth of $2 billion, but has been omitted from recent lists.

As a young man, Gomez was, per flashback in "Morticia's Romance," a perennially sickly youth, gaining perfect health only after meeting Morticia. He nevertheless studied law (voted "Most Likely Never to Pass the Bar"), and although he rarely practices, he takes an absurd delight in losing cases, boasting of having put many criminals behind bars while acting as their defense attorney; this is somewhat contradicted in the episode "The Addams Family Goes to Court," where it is noted that while Gomez has never won a case, he has never lost one either ("Perfect record!" boasts Grandmama). In The New Addams Family, Gomez had also studied medicine.

Gomez has offered contradictory views on work; in one episode, he claims that, although his family was wealthy even in his childhood, he nonetheless performed odd jobs and "scrimped and saved [his] kopeks," which he considered character building. When his son Pugsley decided to find a job, however, Gomez was horrified, claiming that "No Addams has worked in 200 years!" Possibly Gomez, who dotes on his children, feels that behavior that was good enough for him is not good enough for Pugsley. In the 1991 animated series, Gomez deliberately tried to fail at something, anything, only to realize in the end of the episode that he is only a failure in failure. This is additionally contradicted in "New Neighbors Meet the Addams Family" Season 1 : Ep. 9(1960). He specifically states that Thing always beats him at bridge.

Film versions

Gomez was played by Raúl Juliá
Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay was a Puerto Rican actor.Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson...

 in The Addams Family
The Addams Family (film)
The Addams Family is a 1991 American black comedy film based on the characters from the cartoon of the same name created by cartoonist Charles Addams....

(1991
1991 in film
The year 1991 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*April 28 - Bonnie Raitt marries actor Michael O'Keefe in New York* Terminator 2: Judgment Day, became one of the landmarks for science fiction action films with its groundbreaking visual effects from Industrial Light & Magic.*November...

) and Addams Family Values
Addams Family Values
Addams Family Values is a 1993 sequel to the 1991 comedy The Addams Family. The film was written by Paul Rudnick and directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, and many cast members from the original returned for the sequel, including Raúl Juliá, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lloyd, and Christina Ricci...

(1993
1993 in film
The year 1993 in film involved many significant films, including the blockbuster hits Jurassic Park, The Fugitive and The Firm. -Events:...

). The film version of Gomez shares the fun-loving personality of his sitcom counterpart, including his affinity for swordfighting and train sets. However, Gomez is noticeably calmer and more suave in the films than his television counterparts, and even speaks with an English accent (as Juliá had previously adapted his accent to an English one for various Shakespeare plays). Gomez also regularly plays chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 with Thing, the disembodied hand, friend and servant of the family. Another quirk is his tendency to drive golf balls off the roof of his house, enraging his next-door neighbor, who has to contend with the balls smashing his windows. He likes to play darts
Darts
Darts is a form of throwing game where darts are thrown at a circular target fixed to a wall. Though various boards and games have been used in the past, the term "darts" usually now refers to a standardised game involving a specific board design and set of rules...

 as well, with Lurch holding the board and maneuvering it so that he always scores a bullseye; at one point, Lurch forgets to move the board and ends up swallowing a dart.

In the first film, Gomez has lost track of his brother Fester
Uncle Fester
Gordon Craven, Uncle Fester, or Fester Addams, is a member of the fictional Addams Family. He was played by Jackie Coogan in the original television series, by Christopher Lloyd in the first two feature films, and by Patrick Thomas in the third, Addams Family Reunion. Finally, Michael Roberds...

's whereabouts and has not spoken to him in 25 years. Gomez's desire to locate Fester leads him and his family being conned
Confidence trick
A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence. A confidence artist is an individual working alone or in concert with others who exploits characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty and honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility,...

 by grifters who want to swindle their fortune. Gomez is so depressed at being thrown out of his own home that he becomes unemployed and spends all day watching daytime TV.

The films differ from the television series in several ways, most significantly that Fester is Gomez's brother (in the television show, he was Morticia's uncle). The Addams Family notes that Gomez's parents were murdered by an angry mob, though in one scene in the sequel, when Gomez catches Fester with a pornographic magazine, they both look at the centrefold (unseen by the viewer) and fondly say "Mom" (though this could be indicative to the model's likeness to their mother). In Addams Family Values, Gomez and Morticia have a third child named Pubert, a seemingly indestructible baby with a thin, black moustache like his father.

In 1998
1998 in film
-Events:* February 14 - Sharon Stone marries Phil Bronstein.* Former child star Gary Coleman is charged with assaulting a young female bus driver at a California shopping mall.-Top grossing films:...

, Tim Curry
Tim Curry
Timothy James "Tim" Curry is a British actor, singer, composer and voice actor, known for his work in a diverse range of theatre, film and television productions. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California....

 took up the role in the film Addams Family Reunion
Addams Family Reunion
Addams Family Reunion is a film released straight-to-video in 1998. It was also distributed to television by Fox Family. It is unrelated to the two Paramount films from 1991 and 1993. So far, the film is only available on VHS and has not had a DVD release. It was shot in Los Angeles, California...

. The next year, Gomez was played by Glenn Taranto
Glenn Taranto
Glenn Taranto is an American actor and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his role as Gomez on The New Addams Family....

 in the TV series The New Addams Family
The New Addams Family
The New Addams Family is an American/Canadian sitcom that aired from October 1998 to August 1999 and aired on YTV in Canada and Fox Family in the United States. It was produced by Shavick Entertainment and Saban Entertainment as a new version of the 1960s series The Addams Family.-Synopsis:The new...

, where he returned to the madcap attitude of his original 1960s incarnation.
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