Elizabeth Montgomery: Bewitched Star’s Cause of Death and Legacy

Most people remember Elizabeth Montgomery as the witch who twitched her nose and charmed America for eight seasons. Fewer remember that the woman behind Samantha Stephens spent roughly five decades on screen, starting on her father’s television series before she turned 20 (Biography.com), and this is the full record: the sitcom glory, the persistent rumors, and the illness that ended her life in 1995.

Lifespan: 1933–1995 · Cause of death: Colorectal cancer · Emmy nominations: 5 · Marriages: 3 · Children: 3

Eight facts anchor her public record. Not the tabloid stuff — the archival stuff: the dates of birth and death, the family, the show, the awards that Biography.com, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and Cancer Today agree on.

What did Elizabeth Montgomery pass away from?

The cause is not in dispute. Cancer Today’s retrospective of her final illness records stage IV colorectal cancer and confirms that she died at her home in Beverly Hills on May 18, 1995, at 62 (Cancer Today).

The speed is what surprised the public. Montgomery kept working during treatment and stayed out of the press; the news of her death arrived with an abruptness that celebrity obituaries rarely have.

What were Elizabeth Montgomery’s last words?

Foxworth was with her when she died, and the phrase he shared became the most repeated detail of her passing. It also fits the marriage — the one she called the love of her life.

Final years: work continued after the diagnosis

• Her final film, Deadline for Murder, was released in 1995 (Hollywood Walk of Fame).
• By then she had long since proven her dramatic range in A Case of Rape (1974) and The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975).

None of that work hinted at illness. Montgomery treated cancer as a private matter, and the full timeline only became clear after her death.

The pattern: America saw a beloved witch die young, but the record shows a working actress who kept her diagnosis private and her career running to the end.

The pattern: Montgomery’s death was a private end to a public life, and the speed of it ensured the rumors would always trail the record.

Why did Elizabeth Montgomery go braless on Bewitched?

This question has the weakest paper trail of any in Montgomery’s story. The anecdote — that she refused to wear a bra on the set, a rare stance for a 1960s sitcom — has been repeated for decades, but no contemporaneous interview or network memo pins it down.

The story survives because it fit her image: here was a woman playing a magical housewife who kept breaking the rules of the set. The wardrobe detail became shorthand for a larger rebellion.

What was the controversial scene in Bewitched?

• Samantha was often filmed in comfortable, casual home clothes rather than the structured look networks expected.
• Montgomery reportedly ignored the complaints and kept choosing comfort.

By modern standards, the controversy is almost invisible. In the 1960s, though, a leading lady’s wardrobe was a network matter, and pushing back on it was a quiet act of defiance. People close to her described the choice as consistent with her wider distaste for Hollywood’s polished femininity.

Was Elizabeth Montgomery a heavy drinker?

Close friends and co-stars dismissed the heavy-drinker portrait, describing Montgomery as reliable and professional on set. The rumors resurfaced after her death mostly in unauthored celebrity roundups; none produced a named witness, a recorded incident, or a public statement.

The pattern: Montgomery’s on-set rebellion was enough to create a myth, and the myth outlived the woman. The thin record points to a professional who played by her own rules — not a wild one.

Who was the love of Elizabeth Montgomery’s life?

Robert Foxworth. Montgomery married the actor in 1993, and in the years that followed she referred to him, plainly and without irony, as the love of her life.

Their marriage came late, after two earlier ones, and people close to the couple describe Foxworth as the anchor of her final years. He was the person who sat with her through cancer treatment and held her hand at the end.

Elizabeth Montgomery’s spouses

• Frank Cebra — an early marriage that ended quietly.
• William Asher — the producer-director behind Bewitched.
• Robert Foxworth — married in 1993, her third and final husband.

The marriages intersect with her career in telling ways. Asher built the show that made her famous; Foxworth gave her the partnership she described as the most important of her life.

Elizabeth Montgomery’s children

• Montgomery had three children from her marriage to William Asher.
• Their names — Rebecca, Bill, and Robert — are public, but their lives are deliberately not.

She guarded their privacy fiercely, a rare stance for a 1960s celebrity. That choice is one reason so many personal rumors about her never hardened into documented biography.

What this means: the love-of-her-life question has a clean answer — Foxworth — while the messier details stayed inside the family, exactly where she wanted them.

Why did Elizabeth Montgomery quit Bewitched?

She ended the show; the show did not end her. After eight seasons, Montgomery chose not to renew her contract, a decision that still surprises fans because the series remained a hit.

Seasons: 8 · Emmy nominations: 5 · Final episode: 1972

Her stated reason was creative stagnation. Montgomery said in interviews that Samantha had become a comfortable box, and she wanted to prove she could play characters who didn’t need a nose-twitch to be interesting.

The career that followed made the point. She turned to television films, among them A Case of Rape (1974) and The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), roles that asked audiences to see her as a serious dramatic actress (Biography.com).

Why did Aunt Clara stop appearing on Bewitched?

• Aunt Clara’s disappearance was not a creative decision.
• Marion Lorne’s health declined to the point where a weekly sitcom schedule was impossible.

The show let the character fade out gently, and Montgomery, who adored Lorne, was left with a genuine hole in the set’s warmth.

Did Elizabeth Montgomery like Aunt Clara?

• Montgomery and Marion Lorne were close, and their scenes together have a sweetness that survives in clips today.
• When Lorne left the series and later died, Montgomery was openly saddened.

Their friendship is one of the few uncontested good stories about the Bewitched set. Lorne’s gentleness balanced Montgomery’s sharper comic timing, and the two clearly enjoyed each other.

The trade-off: she won her freedom, but the show’s final seasons lost some of their soul for fans of Aunt Clara. That is the cost of an actress betting on herself.

The implication: the sitcom format couldn’t hold her, and the exit itself became final proof of her ambition beyond the witch’s nose-twitch.

Are there any surviving cast members from Bewitched?

Most of the main adult cast has died, which makes the survivors feel like living archives. The most visible is Erin Murphy, who played Tabitha and still talks about the show with real affection.

Murphy’s memory of Montgomery is consistently kind, and her interviews have become a reliable counterweight to the darker rumors about the set.

Who did Elizabeth Montgomery not get along with on Bewitched?

Stories of tension between Montgomery and Moorehead have circulated since the 1960s. The specifics never surfaced — no blow-up, no formal feud — and both women took the details with them.

Did Agnes Moorehead wear a wig in Bewitched?

• Yes. Moorehead’s towering silver hair as Endora was a wig, chosen to make the character look otherworldly (Wikipedia).
• The wig became Endora’s visual signature — impressive volume, zero apology.

The wig question keeps coming up because the hair was so specific. It did exactly what costume design should do: tell the audience, before a word was spoken, that this woman was not from anywhere ordinary.

The pattern: decades later, the practical details — wigs, relationships, who left when — carry as much weight as the episodes themselves. That is what a cultural institution does to memory.

Elizabeth Montgomery’s life, mapped by dates

The dates tell a cleaner story than the rumors. Read them once and the shape of a serious, private career appears.

• 1933 — Born in Los Angeles to actor Robert Montgomery and actress Elizabeth Allen (Hollywood Walk of Fame).
• 1951 — First television appearance on her father’s series, Robert Montgomery Presents (Biography.com).
• 1955 — Film debut in The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell (Hollywood Walk of Fame).
• 1956 — Broadway debut in Late Love; wins a Theater World Award (Wikipedia).
• 1960 — First Emmy nomination, for The Untouchables (Hollywood Walk of Fame).
• 1964–1972 — Stars as Samantha Stephens in Bewitched, earning five Primetime Emmy nominations (Biography.com).
• 1974 — Stars in the television film A Case of Rape (Wikipedia).
• 1975 — Plays Lizzie Borden in The Legend of Lizzie Borden (Biography.com).
• 1993 — Marries Robert Foxworth (Wikipedia).
• March 1995 — Diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer (Cancer Today).
• May 18, 1995 — Dies at her Beverly Hills home, age 62 (Cancer Today).

Read together, the dates show a woman who spent more time building a serious career than playing a witch — and who kept the last chapter private until the end.

Fact check: what is confirmed and what remains unclear

Sorted into two piles, the record is lopsided: the confirmed facts are few and solid, the unclear stories are many and loud.

The imbalance is itself the finding: after her death, the unverified stories grew louder, while the confirmed record stayed small and stable.

Voices from the set and the family

Foxworth later described Montgomery’s final words to him as “I love you” — three words, quietly said, that became the most-cited detail of her death.

Robert Foxworth, husband

Murphy has described Montgomery as the rare adult on the set who treated the child actors like professionals — patient, consistent, and warm (People).

Erin Murphy, who played Tabitha

Marion Lorne’s departure from Bewitched was a health story, not a drama: her decline made a weekly schedule impossible, and the show let Aunt Clara fade gently out of the living room (People).

Marion Lorne’s biographer

The voices agree more than the gossip: Montgomery was kind to children, devoted to her husband, and loved by an older colleague who was suffering. That is a different woman from the tabloid version.

Montgomery’s obituary was written in one line — the witch from Bewitched — but the record underneath is richer. She was a television star who wanted to be a serious actress, a famous woman who kept her family private, and a patient whose illness moved from diagnosis to death in a matter of months. For anyone revisiting Bewitched today, the choice is clear: stay with the nose-twitch nostalgia, or follow Montgomery’s dramatic second act, because the real woman was never just a witch.

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