Elizabeth Montgomery: A Touch of Magic

Elizabeth Montgomery was born into show business. Her parents were screen actor Robert Montgomery and Broadway actress Elizabeth Bryan Allen.

Elizabeth graduated from the Spence School in New York City and attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. After three years intensive training, she made her TV debut at the age of 19 in her father's 1950s playhouse series 'Robert Montgomery Presents'.

She also tried her hand at Broadway, and 'Late Love' was her debut. She married at the age of 21, to TV director Frederic Cammann, but the marriage did not last.

Her big screen break came with 'The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell' in 1955. In 1960, Elizabeth portrayed Rusty Heller, in an episode of 'The Untouchables', and was nominated for her first Emmy.

In 1956, she met her second husband, actor Gig Young, fourteen years her senior and an abusive alcoholic. They were divorced in time for her to marry producer William Asher in 1963. Their union produced three children.

Her most famous role was Samantha Stephens, the nose twitching sorceress married to a mortal. 'Bewitched' lasted eight seasons on ABC, and garnered the cast and crew many Emmy nominations and awards, five alone for Elizabeth.

After 'Bewitched', Liz went on to make a number of TV movies. She portrayed Lizzie Borden in 'The Legend of Lizzie Borden', for which she received another Emmy nomination.

Elizabeth Montgomery was not only a versatile television actress but also an AIDS and Gay Rights activist. She had very liberal political views and narrated a series of documentaries in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including 'Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair' (1988) and the Academy Award winning 'The Panama Deception' (1992).

She died of cancer in May 1995. She passed away just eight weeks after her cancer diagnosis.

Peter Graves (Host)
Rebecca Asher
William Asher
Dominick Dunne
Robert Foxworth
Sandra Gould
Elizabeth Montgomery
Liz Sheridan

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Secrets d'histoire Season 20 Finale: Stéphane Bern's Messalina Episode Ends a Season About Reputations on Trial

Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.

A finale that puts history's verdict on trial

The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.

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