Maggie' Smith's 2 husbands and their tangled love stories

Maggie Smith, the two-time Academy Award-winning actor who also appeared in “Downton Abbey” and the “Harry Potter” film franchise, has died at the age of 89.

A star on the big and small screen, Smith was also married twice, first to actor Robert Stephens and then to playwright Beverley Cross. Read on to find out more about her husbands.

Robert Stephens

Smith and Stephens married on June 19, 1967. They would have two children together, sons Chris and Toby.

Smith and Stephens would also mix business with pleasure, starring in the 1969 movie “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” which netted Smith her first Oscar, which she won for best actress. They would appear together again in the 1972 film “Travels with My Aunt,” a movie which also earned Smith an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.

The marriage frayed due to Stephens' mental health challenges and infidelity. He attempted suicide in 1970.

“And after that it was just hopeless,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “We had two little boys. He didn’t understand. I sure as hell didn’t understand. It got worse and then it went on getting worse and worse. In the end it was destroying everybody. And he was having so many affairs.”

Still, Smith appreciated the family they built.

“I have two wonderful sons and he is the reason for that,” she told The Guardian.

The pair’s divorce was finalized in 1975. Stephens died in 1995 at the age of 64.

Beverley Cross

Cross and Smith, who had known each other since the 1950s when she was in a student revue at Oxford, got married in 1975 and would remain so until he died in 1998 at the age of 66.

Cross would actually first marry another woman from Oxford, Elizabeth Clunies-Ross, but he never strayed too far from Smith, casting her in his second play, “Strip the Willow,” in 1960, according to his New York Times obituary.

Cross would eventually get divorced. According to his obituary, Smith and Cross began a relationship at that time, but then fate intervened again.

Cross suggested Smith join Britain’s National Theatre at the Old Vic, where she then met her first husband, Stephens. "Mr. Cross was filled, he said later, with murderous hatred for Mr. Stephens," the New York Times obituary read.

Smith said her relationship with Stephens can be traced to Cross, telling the Guardian that meeting Stephens “was entirely Bev’s fault. Because he made me go to the National Theatre when I had already said no.”

Cross would marry a second time, this time to Gayden Collins, but get divorced after Smith and Stephens split, setting the stage for them to tie the knot.

They didn’t have children, although Cross had kids from his previous marriages.

Smith and Cross missed each other for years before they finally got together, a twist of fate she clearly understood.

“I’m remarkably fortunate,’’ she is quoted as saying in Cross' obituary in The New York Times. “When you meet again someone you should have married in the first place, it’s like a script. That kind of luck is too good to be true.’’

This article was originally published on TODAY.com