Robert Foxworth turned 85 on Sunday, November 1, and the question people still ask about him has little to do with the vineyard he fought over on Falcon Crest. They want to know about Elizabeth Montgomery. The Houston-born actor spent more than two decades beside the woman America knew as Samantha on Bewitched, and for most of those years the couple politely declined to marry. “Elizabeth and I are very happy with our arrangement,” he told UPI in May 1992. “So we see no reason to change our way of life.”
The story of Robert Foxworth and Elizabeth Montgomery starts on the set of a TV Western in 1974, with a leading lady whose marriage was ending and a stage actor who, by his own account, had no idea who she was.
How Did Robert Foxworth and Elizabeth Montgomery Meet?
Foxworth was born November 1, 1941, in Houston and trained as an actor at Carnegie Mellon University. He came up through the theater, working at Arena Stage in Washington before reaching Broadway in Henry V in 1969. In 1972, he won a Theatre World Award for playing John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at Lincoln Center.
Two years later ABC cast him in Mrs. Sundance, a TV movie with Montgomery as Etta Place, the Sundance Kid’s companion living on the run. He played Jack Maddox, a fellow fugitive who becomes her ally. Her marriage to William Asher, the director and producer behind Bewitched, ended in the fall of 1974, and TCM’s biography of Montgomery says she and her co-star “fell in love during shooting.” Foxworth later admitted he hadn’t known she was the daughter of movie star Robert Montgomery. “I didn’t know who she was,” he told the Baltimore Sun in 1996.
By 1975 they were living together, and what followed lasted longer than many Hollywood marriages without a license to show for it.
Why Did They Refuse to Make It Official?
Both had been married before. Foxworth had a son, Bo, and a daughter, Kristyn, from his first marriage to Marilyn McCormick, and Montgomery had three children with Asher. Foxworth told UPI in 1992 that neither of them saw a reason to add more paperwork. “There’s a strong temptation in marriage to take one’s partner for granted,” he explained. “When there are no legally binding ties, I think people are apt to be more considerate of each other.”
They also kept working side by side. In the Hallmark Hall of Fame film Face to Face, shot on location in Africa, her character despised his, and he told UPI the feeling followed her off camera. “Here we were living in the same tent in the African bush for four weeks,” he recalled. “I reminded her it was just a movie and not to bring the part home to the tent.” They performed A.R. Gurney’s two-person play Love Letters on Broadway in 1989 and later in San Diego and San Francisco, and by 1992 they were co-starring in the CBS movie With Murder in Mind. “We laugh at the same things,” he said, and he credited that shared sense of play for keeping them together so long.
His own career, meanwhile, had taken a turn years earlier that could have made him the man America loved to hate.
The Role He Turned Down and the One That Made Him Famous
In 1974 NBC aired The Questor Tapes, a pilot written by Gene Roddenberry and fellow Star Trek veteran Gene L. Coon, with Foxworth as an android searching for his creator. The network had ordered episodes, but the series fell apart when NBC and Roddenberry couldn’t agree on changes. A few years later, the producers of Dallas offered him J.R. Ewing. Creator David Jacobs told the Dallas Decoder that Foxworth asked on a conference call how they would make J.R. more sympathetic, and Jacobs told him they wouldn’t. Foxworth passed, and Larry Hagman took the part.
His answer came in 1981 with Falcon Crest, where he played Chase Gioberti, the decent nephew forever clashing with Jane Wyman’s Angela Channing. He stayed through 1987 and directed roughly 15 hours of the show, according to the Baltimore Sun. If you tuned in on Friday nights after Dallas, Chase was the man you rooted for. Star Trek called again in 1996, when he played the scheming Admiral Leyton in the Deep Space Nine episodes “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost,” and later the Vulcan administrator V’Las on Enterprise. He later voiced the Autobot Ratchet in the Transformers films before retiring, and he has been married to Stacey Thomas since 1998. (Here’s where his Falcon Crest castmates are now.)
Still, the man who said a marriage license might “impinge” on an actor’s career had one more surprise in him.
What Happened After He Said They Had No Reason to Marry?
Less than a year after that UPI interview, in January 1993, Robert Foxworth and Elizabeth Montgomery quietly married after nearly 20 years together. She became his second wife, and he became the fourth and final husband of a woman who had not wanted to marry again. The reference work Women in World History says the marriage was not disclosed to the public until after her death.
That came far too soon. In the spring of 1995, after finishing the TV movie Deadline for Murder, Montgomery was diagnosed with colon cancer, and it had already spread. She died at the Beverly Hills house she shared with Foxworth on May 18, 1995, at 62, with her husband and her three children beside her. “She always chose roles that challenged her and surprised the audience,” he told People that June.
At her memorial service at the Canon Theatre, Foxworth read aloud from the sympathy cards fans had sent. When she finally received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008, he stood in the crowd and told them, “It is a great tribute to her that there are so many of you here.” A year after her death, he described her best to the Baltimore Sun. “She energized everybody, made them feel important and responsible and creative,” he said. “That is a great gift.”
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