Addams Family star was far more than his tragic death

Raul Julia's final film, 'Street Fighter', turns 30 this week.

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Louis Chilton salutes the man who wooed Morticia Addams, mesmerised Meryl Streep and felt destined for true greatness

When Meryl Streep first got to know Raul Julia, her co-star in a 1978 production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, she was “terrified” of him. “Everything about him was so big,” she said. “His eyes, his gestures, his smile – and he was so loud.” During one rehearsal, a particularly intense in-character quarrel saw her attack the Puerto Rican actor with her fingernails. Julia, fighting back, stabbed her with a pencil point. The incident left Streep with a permanent mark on her arm. Before long, it was a scar she had grown to cherish.

Julia had a way of leaving his mark on most everyone he encountered – either in person, or through art. As Gomez Addams in The Addams Family (1991) and its immaculate 1993 sequel, he was the picture of mordant urbanity. He shone as a tortured revolutionary in the 1985 Oscar winner Kiss of the Spider Woman. For those lucky enough to see him live, though, Julia belonged to the stage: he was an actor who mesmerised in a litany of Shakespeare plays, who drew blood in Broadway’s Dracula, who sang and danced with the best of them.

And then, suddenly and devastatingly, Julia was gone. He was 54 years old when he died, of complications from a stroke in 1994, having been diagnosed with stomach cancer three years earlier. His final film, released posthumously 30 years ago this week, remains one of Julia’s best-loved roles, the bombastic video game adaptation