John Astin turned 96 on March 30, and the man who kissed his way up Morticia’s arm as Gomez Addams is still at work. He was born that day in 1930 in Baltimore, and this year he went back to the mad scientist Professor Mortimer Gangreen, the villain he played through the Killer Tomatoes sequels, for Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: Organic Intelligence. On Thursday, Hello! Magazine turned the spotlight on the family he raised off camera, and it is a bigger one than many fans realize.
Astin is the father of five sons from two marriages. Three of them have never sought the spotlight, and two followed him into acting. One of those two came into his life as a toddler, though, and the question of who his biological father was hung over the family for more than 20 years until a single test settled it.
How Did Gomez Addams End Up With Five Sons?
Long before the cigars and the fencing foils, Astin was a young stage actor who married Suzanne Hahn in 1956. Their marriage lasted until 1972 and gave him his first three boys, David, Allen and Thomas. Allen was born in 1961 and Tom in 1965, according to IMDb, which would make them 65 and 61 today. Hello! reports that all three, including eldest son David, have kept their lives out of the public eye, and none of them followed their father into show business.
By then, of course, Astin had already become television’s most romantic patriarch. The Addams Family ran on ABC from 1964 to 1966 for 64 episodes, and he has never minded that strangers still know him as Gomez. “I guess nobody else has a head shaped like mine,” he told ABC News in 2012. “So, I get recognized quite often.” He was proud that the spooky clan was a loving one. “Bizarre as we appeared to be, psychiatrists who wrote about the show thought we were the healthiest family on the air,” he said.
His own household was about to get a good deal more complicated. The next woman in his life had already won an Oscar for playing Helen Keller.
Which Son Did Patty Duke Bring Into The Marriage?
Patty Duke gave birth to a son named Sean on February 25, 1971, in Santa Monica, California. She and Astin married in 1972, when the boy was about 18 months old, and Astin adopted him and raised him as his own. That is how Sean Patrick Duke became Sean Astin.
The gossip columns had their own theory about the baby. At the time, it was widely reported that his father was Desi Arnaz Jr., the teenage son of Lucille Ball, whom Duke had dated. “There was a lot of stuff in the press early on,” Astin told People in 2001. Sean, he added, “basically grew up without any real knowledge of all that stuff.”
The couple’s second son arrived soon after. Mackenzie Astin was born on May 12, 1973, in Los Angeles, and he is the only one of the five boys who is the biological child of both Astin and Duke.
What Are Sean And Mackenzie Astin Doing Now?
Both boys were working actors before they could drive. Sean was 14 when he played Mikey in The Goonies in 1985, and he later carried Rudy in 1993 before playing Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Now 55, he has added a title his mother once held. In September 2025 he was elected president of SAG-AFTRA with about 79 percent of the vote, the Associated Press reported, and Duke had led the Screen Actors Guild from 1985 to 1988.
Mackenzie, now 53, became a familiar face to sitcom fans as Andy Moffett, the orphan Beverly Ann takes in on The Facts of Life, a role he began in 1985 and played for four seasons. You can see how the rest of that cast is doing in our look at the surviving stars of The Facts of Life. He went on to lead the 1994 Disney adventure Iron Will, and in the past two years he has turned up on HBO Max’s medical drama The Pitt and on Landman.
Astin and Duke divorced in 1985. He married Valerie Ann Sandobal in 1989, and Hello! reports they still live together in Baltimore, where he spent years teaching acting at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University. Duke, whose own sitcom fans still remember fondly (see the last surviving member of The Patty Duke Show), died in 2016. Before she did, she found herself at odds with her eldest son over the biggest question of his life.
What Did The DNA Test Finally Show?
When Sean was 14, Duke told him that Desi Arnaz Jr. was his biological father, and he grew up believing it. The full story was messier. In 1970, months before Sean was born, Duke had married a rock promoter named Michael Tell, and that marriage lasted just 13 days. In 1994 Sean met Tell’s niece, who urged him to take a paternity test. It showed that his biological father was Tell, not Arnaz.
Duke never accepted it. “I don’t buy that test,” she told People in 2001, though she said she could support her son’s truth “as long as my truth, if not supported, is respected.” Sean was clear about where he stood. “If you want to know who I am, John Astin is my father, Michael Tell is my biological father,” he told the same magazine, and he spoke warmly of Arnaz, “who is like my godfather.”
Tell died in Las Vegas in April 2025 at the age of 80, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. Remarkably, the two men never became rivals. “His biological dad turns out to be a great guy and we’ve become friendly,” Astin told People. He saved his best line for the son he chose. “The greatest treasures are the treasures of the heart,” he said, “and Sean is a treasure.”
