He knew he was dying. He wanted to leave his family provided for, and he wanted to give his children something. So he let them look at the pile of scripts and make their choice about what his last movie would be—the pile had gotten larger in recent years, since he had become more of a household name. It is true that the role they chose for him was one that fit his natural flamboyance and larger-than-life personality, but it’s also true that I cannot think of Street Fighter without thinking, “Poor Raul Julia.”

Oh, it’s probably not his worst role. I admit I haven’t actually watched it, but can it be worse than Overdrawn at the Memory Bank? Still, one of the reasons I haven’t seen it is that it’s such a depressing end to a phenomenal career. What I think, when I stop to contemplate the subject, is of his Life obituary, wherein they lamented that they’d never see him play King Lear. He did no little Shakespeare over the course of his career, both on stage and on screen. He was equally adept at comedy and tragedy. He could be wonderfully ominous and intensely sexual. He was a man of incredible talent and deep compassion.

So sure, Gomez Addams isn’t exactly Edmund, the King Lear role I’ve seen him in. (With James Earl Jones as Lear.) However, I don’t know how anyone else in the role could be anything other than lacking. The word I’m left wanting to use to describe him as Gomez is “panache.” No matter how ludicrous the situation, Gomez—and Julia as Gomez—threw himself into it wholeheartedly. It’s a role that’s easy to undervalue as a performance, but it took quite a lot of skill to make as iconic as Julia did. Part of it is his natural chemistry with Anjelica Huston and Christopher Lloyd—those movies are extremely well cast all the way around—but a lot of it is just Raul Julia.

He had, though, an extraordinarily busy career. Gaps in his IMDb are always filled with work on stage; gaps in his stage work are always filled with film or television. Often both; sometimes, he did all three at once. So sure, if I hadn’t gone with Gomez, I would’ve gone with Roberto Strausmann from Moon Over Parador, but there are literally dozens of choices. I’ve even seen some of his work from his eleven appearances on Sesame Street as a character named Rafael. And I do recommend seeking out that Lear, which is definitely a better thing PBS did for him than Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.

Sure, so was Sesame Street, which was just one more example of his passion for education. Busy as he was, he always took time for his causes, and that was one of them. Some of the roles he took were in support of those causes, which included alleviating hunger and fighting for Puerto Rican independence. He wanted to raise awareness of certain dangerous South and Central American regimes. In a way, knowing he died of stomach cancer makes me compare him to Kanji Watanabe of Ikiru. He made his life mean something so that there would be more to him than someone who died too young.

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