The Stunning Transformation Of Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith’s love life wasn’t exactly straightforward. She met Beverley Cross, the man who would later become her second husband, at the age of 18. He proposed, but Smith married Robert Stephens instead, a fellow actor, in 1967. Her friends didn’t exactly approve. 

“God knows, Larry tried hard to persuade him not to go anywhere near me,” she told The Guardian in 2004. The pair acted together in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and had two sons, Toby and Chris, both of whom went on to become actors, too. She spoke to The Guardian in 1969 about her children: “I felt a tremendously strong desire to have them but I was amazed at it, I thought, ‘This isn’t your theme at all, what’s come over it?’ but now I’ve done it twice, I feel a far greater sense of achievement than with anything I’ve ever done before.” She continued working while juggling her family.

Stephens struggled with his mental health in the ’70s and was eventually diagnosed as “hypermanic.” “It got worse and then it went on getting worse and worse,” Smith recalled to The Guardian in 2004. “In the end, it was destroying everybody. And he was having so many affairs.” In 1973, Stephens and Smith divorced.