Elizabeth Montgomery died at home in Beverly Hills on May 18, 1995, at the age of 62. The cause was colon cancer. What stunned the country was that almost no one outside her closest circle knew she had been ill. Her diagnosis had come roughly two months earlier, in March 1995, and she had deliberately chosen to keep it private.
For a woman whose face had been a fixture in American living rooms for over three decades, it was a remarkably quiet exit. The public knew her as Samantha Stephens, the suburban witch who solved problems with a twitch of her nose on *Bewitched*. That image was real, but it was incomplete. Elizabeth Montgomery was a serious dramatic actress, the daughter of a Hollywood legend, a woman who married four times, and someone who spent her final years steering her career toward socially important work rather than nostalgia.
She was born Elizabeth Victoria Montgomery on April 15, 1933, in Los Angeles. Her father, Robert Montgomery, was one of MGM’s biggest stars. Her mother, Elizabeth Brian Allen, was a stage actress. Despite the privileged Beverly Hills upbringing, the household was demanding.
Robert Montgomery had strong opinions and, for a long time, did not want his daughter to become an actress. She pursued acting anyway. After attending the Spence School in Manhattan, she enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Her early television work came on her father’s own anthology series, *Robert Montgomery Presents*, in the early 1950s.
She was good enough that critics took her seriously in her own right. Her personal life was complicated from a young age. In March 1954, at 20, she married Frederick Gallatin Came, a man from a well-known East Coast family. The marriage lasted just over a year.
At 22, she filed for divorce and walked away. It was, by every account, a mistake born of doing what was expected of her. In December 1956, she married actor Gig Young. He was nearly 20 years older, charming and successful, but he had a serious drinking problem.
The marriage lasted about seven years, and biographers have described those years as some of the most painful of her life. The relationship deteriorated as his alcoholism worsened. She stayed for years and eventually left. During those years, her career was quietly building momentum.
She appeared in *The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell* in 1955, directed by Otto Preminger. In 1961, she earned an Emmy nomination for her performance in *The Untouchables*. By the summer of 1963, her divorce from Young was final, and she was 30 years old. Shortly after, she married William Asher, a director and producer she had met while working on the 1963 crime drama *Johnny Cool*.
Both were ending marriages when they met, and their professional and personal connections developed together. In October 1963, they were married. It was her third marriage. They soon became partners on a new project.
*Bewitched*, created by writer Sol Saks at Screen Gems, was being developed, and Asher became one of its most important producers and directors. Elizabeth was cast as Samantha, and the role was not automatic. The network had considered other actresses, including Tammy Grimes. But when Elizabeth read for it, something clicked.
She played Samantha not as a magical being pretending to be human, but as a real woman who happened to have magical abilities and chose, out of love, not to use them often. The show premiered on September 17, 1964, on ABC. By the end of its first season, it was the second most-watched program on American television, behind only *Bonanza*. The show ran eight seasons, from 1964 to 1972, for 254 episodes.
Elizabeth received five consecutive Emmy nominations for her performance as Samantha but never won. The early years of the show coincided with the most demanding years of new motherhood. Her son William Jr. was born in 1964, just months before *Bewitched* premiered.
A second son, Robert, followed in 1965, and a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969. There is a story, repeated in later accounts, about a telegram from her father arriving around the beginning of *Bewitched*. The original telegram has not surfaced, and retellings disagree about its tone. Some say it was encouraging; others say it was a warning.
What matters is how the story captured something true about the distance and connection between father and daughter. In 1969, Dick York, who had played Darren Stevens since the pilot, left the show due to a severe back injury. The producers replaced him with Dick Sargent and continued as if nothing had happened. Elizabeth welcomed Sargent with warmth and helped him find the rhythm of the show.
They developed a genuine friendship. By 1972, ratings had softened, and Elizabeth had quietly decided she was ready to stop. The final episode aired in March 1972. There was no big farewell.
She was 38 years old. Around the same time, her marriage to Asher was ending. The show ended, the marriage dissolved, and the professional team that had shaped Samantha together was over. In the mid-1970s, she feared she would only ever be seen as Samantha.
What she did next answered that fear completely. In February 1974, she starred in *A Case of Rape*, a television film that showed, in ways prime-time television never had before, what happened to a woman trying to seek justice for sexual assault. The film became one of the highest-rated made-for-television movies of its era and earned her another Emmy nomination. She did not stop there.
In 1975, she played Lizzie Borden in *The Legend of Lizzie Borden*. Her performance was cold, controlled, and unsettling, the exact opposite of Samantha. It brought her another Emmy nomination. Years later, genealogical researchers suggested Elizabeth and Lizzie Borden shared distant New England ancestry, but Elizabeth did not choose the part because of that.
She chose it because it was a remarkable role. She kept working through the late 1970s and into the 1980s, choosing roles that pushed her further from Samantha. She starred in the frontier miniseries *The Awakening Land*, playing a woman whose life unfolds across decades of settlement. She also took on roles in *Act of Violence*, *Belle Starr*, *The Rules of Marriage*, and other television films.
The patterns were consistent: she repeatedly walked toward women under pressure, women making impossible choices. Off-screen, her personal life settled into a long partnership. She and actor Robert Foxworth met while working together in the mid-1970s and eventually began living together. They did not marry.
In the 1970s and 1980s, an open, long-term unmarried partnership between two celebrities drew some attention from the press. Elizabeth did not care. In October 1978, her second husband, Gig Young, shot and killed his new wife and then himself in their New York apartment. The tragedy dominated the news for days.
There is little reliable public record of Elizabeth’s private reaction. She did not turn her earlier marriage into a retrospective public drama. Her father, Robert Montgomery, died in September 1981 at 77. The relationship had traveled a long, complicated road.
In later years, according to people close to the family, they had reached a kind of peace, not a warm sentimental one, but a working one. In the 1980s and 1990s, her political and humanitarian interests became more visible. She supported liberal causes, AIDS-related charities, and Amnesty International. She served as narrator for *The Panama Deception*, a documentary about the U.
S. invasion of Panama that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1992. That same year, she stood publicly beside her former *Bewitched* co-star Dick Sargent. In 1991, Sargent had publicly come out as a gay man, a considerably braver act for a working American actor at the time.
Elizabeth immediately defended him in the press. In 1992, the two of them served together as grand marshals of the Los Angeles Pride Parade. In January 1993, after nearly two decades together, Elizabeth Montgomery and Robert Foxworth quietly married. She was 59.
He was 51. There was no elaborate publicity campaign around it. She kept working almost to the end. Her second film as Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan, *Deadline for Murder*, aired on May 9, 1995, just nine days before she died.
Viewers watching her had no reason to know how little time she had left. Her illness remained private. She did not announce the diagnosis, give a farewell interview, or invite cameras into her home. Her family closed ranks around her.
She died at home, surrounded by family and Foxworth. After her death, the country reacted with shock. The surprise became a central theme of obituaries. Major newspapers and broadcasters looked back over a career that stretched from live television drama to one of the defining sitcoms of the 1960s and into two decades of television movies.
She was cremated, and her family kept the arrangements private. A memorial followed later, but the tone remained consistent with how she had lived. Even in death, there was a boundary between public affection and family grief. Ten years after her death, in June 2005, TV Land presented Salem, Massachusetts, with a nine-foot bronze statue of Samantha riding side-saddle on a broom.
The city accepted it for Lappin Park. The choice was deliberately playful, but it was controversial. Salem’s real witch trials belonged to 1692, and some residents felt the cheerful television witch trivialized that history. Others argued Samantha belonged to a different category, a tribute to classic television.
The statue is still there. The controversy revealed how much cultural weight the character still carried. Samantha had become a piece of American visual shorthand. Rumors have circulated in the years since her death, many of them unsourced gossip.
Elizabeth’s daughter, Elizabeth “Buffy” Montgomery, has spoken publicly about living with the illness and choosing to keep it private. Foxworth survived her and later remarried. William Asher lived until 2012 and continued to describe Elizabeth as central to what made *Bewitched* work. Dick Sargent died of prostate cancer in July 1994, nearly a year before her.
Dick York died in 1992. Agnes Moorehead died in 1974, two years after the show ended. Marian Lorne had died even before the series finished. With each passing year, the surviving circle around the series became smaller, while the fictional family on screen remained permanently young.
Elizabeth Montgomery earned nine Emmy nominations throughout her career and never won. She married four times and had three children. She starred in one of the most successful comedies in the history of American television and spent more than two decades successfully not being imprisoned by it. She took on difficult television dramas about sexual violence, crime, and women under extreme strain.
She stood beside Dick Sargent at Pride. She narrated a politically contentious documentary that won an Academy Award. When cancer entered her life, she kept the illness out of the public arena for the few weeks she had left. She died on her own terms, quietly, surrounded by the people she loved.
The image the world holds of Samantha does not erase the complicated, thoughtful, stubborn woman behind it. The record, taken as a whole, is more than enough.