📰 She Died 30 Years Ago — Now Her Children Confirm the Rumors About Elizabeth Montgomery

When Bewitched first aired in 1964, Elizabeth Montgomery became one of television’s most beloved icons.

As Samantha Stephens, the charming witch who tried to live as an ordinary housewife, she embodied the ideal woman of her era — graceful, witty, endlessly patient.

But when the cameras stopped rolling, Elizabeth’s life was far from a fantasy.

Born in 1933 to Hollywood royalty — actor and director Robert Montgomery and Broadway actress Elizabeth Daniel Bryan Allen — she grew up surrounded by fame but starved of affection.

Her father was a perfectionist, distant, and emotionally cold.

Those close to the family later revealed that he treated Elizabeth less like a daughter and more like a rival for attention.

“She spent her life trying to win her father’s approval,” one family friend said. “And when she couldn’t, she kept trying — in every man she loved.”

That painful dynamic would shape her romantic life. Montgomery’s children have since confirmed what many had suspected — that their mother was drawn to troubled, dominant men, men who mirrored the same emotional distance she grew up with.

Her first marriage, to socialite Frederick Cammann, ended within a year. Her second, to actor Gig Young, was even darker — marked by jealousy and instability.

Young, who would later die in a murder-suicide, battled alcoholism and emotional turmoil throughout their relationship.

Elizabeth left him, heartbroken but determined to move on.

Then came her third husband — Bewitched director William Asher — and for a time, life seemed magical again.

They shared professional success, three children, and a home that looked like the picture of Hollywood happiness.

But even that fairy tale cracked. Asher’s controlling nature and infidelity weighed heavily on her, and the pressures of fame didn’t help.

“My mother was Samantha to the world,” her son Bill Asher once said, “but at home, she was just trying to hold it together.”

By the early 1970s, as Bewitched ended its run, Elizabeth’s personal life was unraveling.

The strain of balancing career, family, and her own need for freedom finally reached a breaking point.

She divorced Asher in 1973 and entered into a series of complicated relationships — one of them with actor Robert Foxworth, the man who would ultimately become her greatest love.

Foxworth was different. He was kind, grounded, and emotionally open — everything her previous partners were not.

They lived together for nearly two decades before marrying in 1993. For the first time, her children said, Elizabeth found real peace.

“He adored her,” her daughter Rebecca said in a later interview. “He let her be herself — not the witch, not the star — just Liz.”

But life had one more cruel twist to deliver. In 1995, Elizabeth was diagnosed with colon cancer. She kept her illness private, refusing to make her final days a public spectacle.

“She was always in control of her image,” Foxworth said. “Even at the end, she wanted dignity.” She died just two months after her diagnosis, at only 62 years old.

Now, thirty years later, her children have opened up about their mother’s real story — not the sparkling Hollywood fairy tale, but the life of a woman who struggled to balance love, independence, and identity in an industry that demanded perfection.

They confirm that Elizabeth had been courted by some of the biggest names of her era — Elvis Presley, Dean Martin, even Gary Cooper — but that true happiness always seemed to elude her until her final years.

“She was magnetic,” one of her sons said, “but lonely. People saw Samantha — they didn’t see her.”

Elizabeth Montgomery’s life, like her magic, was full of contradictions: adored but isolated, powerful but vulnerable, luminous but haunted by the ghosts of her past.

Her children’s honesty about her pain has finally given her story the depth it always deserved — not just the perfection of a bewitched smile, but the truth of the woman behind it.

Because Elizabeth Montgomery wasn’t just the witch who made the world believe in magic — she was the woman who learned, too late, that real magic isn’t found in spells or fame.

It’s found in finally being loved for who you are.

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