Erin Murphy Played Tabitha on “Bewitched”, and Here Is What She Is Doing Now

TLDR: Erin Murphy played Tabitha Stephens on Bewitched from 1966 to 1972, appearing in 103 episodes starting when she was just two years old. After the show ended she deliberately stepped back from acting to live a normal childhood.

Today, at 61, she runs businesses, advocates for autism awareness, remains active in the classic TV community, and is one of the most candid sources alive on what it was actually like behind the scenes on the show.

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Most child stars who spend their formative years in front of a camera carry the experience as a kind of gravitational pull for the rest of their lives, unable to fully escape what they were famous for.

Erin Murphy has handled her Bewitched years differently.

She is proud of Tabitha, genuinely fond of the memories, and completely clear-eyed about what the experience was and was not.

In a string of candid recent interviews, she has become one of the most reliable, thoughtful voices on the show’s backstage reality, including details about its cast, its abrupt ending, and the complicated woman at its center.

She Was Cast Because of Child Labor Laws

Erin Margaret Murphy was born on June 17, 1964, in Encino, California, eighteen minutes after her fraternal twin sister Diane.

The two girls were not identical, but the producers of Bewitched were specifically looking for twins when they cast the role of Tabitha Stephens in 1966.

Child labor laws at the time restricted the number of hours a single child could work on a production each day. Two children sharing the same role effectively doubled the available shooting time.

Once they had the girls, the difference in their temperaments made the division of labor fairly obvious.

Erin loved the lights and the camera from the beginning. Diane found the set distressing and would cry when brought in. “My sister used to cry when they would bring her on set,” Murphy has said.

The production used Erin for close-ups and scenes with major dramatic content and Diane for long shots and cutaways.

As the two girls grew and looked increasingly unlike each other, Diane left the production and Erin continued in the role alone through the show’s final episode in 1972.

What It Was Actually Like Growing Up on That Set

Murphy has described the experience with remarkable warmth and specificity. She called Elizabeth Montgomery “Mantha Mommy” because she could not pronounce Samantha, and called Dick Sargent “Darren Daddy.”

The set was genuinely a kind of second home for most of her childhood. She has said Montgomery was the adult she looked to as a role model and a parent figure, even while acknowledging that Montgomery was also a serious businesswoman who kept clear boundaries between her professional and personal life.

Her favorite person on the entire set, she has said in retrospect, was Agnes Moorehead.

Between takes, Moorehead would bring Murphy into her dressing room, read her Bible stories, and draw whimsical cartoons of mice and witches to keep her entertained.

“I loved her like a grandparent,” Murphy has said. “I had grandparents who lived in other states I didn’t get to see, and she didn’t have grandchildren, and we had a really great, loving relationship.”

Murphy was also one of the closest witnesses to the complicated transition when Dick York left and Dick Sargent arrived.

She has offered nuanced accounts of both men: York was paternal and warm, treating her like one of his own children. Sargent was a great guy with whom she remained in close contact until his death.

Her accounts of Agnes Moorehead’s reaction to the transition, which she has consistently described as initially frosty but professionally contained, have become some of the most cited first-person corrections to the more sensationalized versions of that backstage history.

The End She Did Not See Coming

Murphy has been equally candid about the show’s abrupt 1972 ending.

She explained that the cast went on their summer hiatus fully expecting to return, with contracts in place for two additional seasons.

“We went on hiatus like always, expecting to come back,” she has said. “The final episode was just like any other week of the show. None of us knew it was the final episode while we were filming it. There was no goodbye party except for the end-of-season wrap party. But that was like every other season.”

The news came by letter and telegram during the break. For an eight-year-old, the loss was primarily about missing the people she had spent twelve hours a day with for most of her life.

She has said she stayed in touch with the Montgomery and Asher children in the years that followed, and that the cast’s extended family connections outlasted the professional ones.

Life After Tabitha

Murphy’s post-Bewitched path was deliberately ordinary.

She guest-starred on a 1973 episode of Lassie, turned down an offer to appear on The Waltons because she was at Girl Scout camp and decided the camp mattered more, and generally allowed herself to experience a normal adolescence.

She became a cheerleader, was crowned homecoming queen in her senior year at El Toro High School, and graduated in 1981.

When she turned 21, she received the funds from a Coogan account that had been set aside from her Bewitched earnings, bought a house and a horse, and started a family.

Her working life in the years that followed included casting directing, makeup artistry, fashion styling, acting instruction, and motivational speaking.

She worked at the makeup counter of a department store in a suburban California mall for a period after the show, something she has referred to publicly with easy humor.

More recently she has returned to the entertainment world, hosting reality programming, serving as a celebrity judge, and building two businesses.

One, Erin Murphy Knits, sells alpaca knitwear she makes herself. The other is Slim Chillers, a line of frozen vodka martini ice pops distributed nationally and internationally.

Murphy is also an outspoken advocate for autism awareness.

One of her six sons has autism, and she has spoken publicly about the experience of parenting a child with the condition and navigating the resources and challenges that come with it.

She is 61 years old in 2026, active on social media, and still the person most audiences picture when they hear the name Tabitha Stephens.

She has said she would consider participating in a Bewitched reboot if the script and creative team were right, without committing to any specific role.

It is, perhaps, the most Tabitha Stephens answer imaginable: open to magic, but not rushing into anything.