Erin Murphy was only two years old when she began playing the role of Tabitha Stephens on the ABC sitcom Bewitched. The child actress appeared in 103 episodes of the fantasy comedy series, starting in Season 3 in 1966 to 1972, per IMDb.
Producers only auditioned twins for the role of Tabitha due to California’s child labor laws that restricted the amount of time a child could be on set, so Murphy’s twin sister, Diane, shared the role with her. But Diane only appeared in 21 episodes of Bewitched—and sometimes as other characters, not as Tabitha.
In an October 2025 interview with Remind Magazine, Erin Murphy revealed that her twin sister was only really around during her first season on the show in 1966. “And then she went away, and I was there by myself,” Murphy shared, before revealing how producers snuck around the strict child labor laws.
“So, the things I’ve been told that I didn’t remember or know at the time, [producer / director] Bill Asher, who was married to Liz [Elizabeth Montgomery], said that they would bring me off set and then bring me back on set. And basically, they’d walk me off stage and say, ‘Okay, bring Diane,’ and then they would walk me back because I was so well-behaved,” she said. “So even when we were ‘working together’… we weren’t actually working together. They were kind of double-using me, which they couldn’t do today. Back in the ’60s, they got away with a lot.”
In a video interview posted by Pop Goes the Culture TV, Murphy recalled how producers “got away” with things by hiring her twin. “Bill Asher, the producer, would say, ‘Okay, it’s time to bring Diane on, and then they would bring me over to the side and they’d bring me back on again,” she recalled in the interview. “So they hired twins, but they ended up using mostly me.”
Murphy previously explained that she didn’t look exactly like her twin sister, even when they were kids, which contributed to the backhanded on-set switcheroo. “My sister and I are fraternal twins, and they were only auditioning twins for the part of Tabitha because twins can work more hours,” she told Studio 10 in 2020. “As soon as they hired us, they realized that we really don’t look that much alike.”
As the Murphy twins got older, they began to look even less alike. Murphy told Pop Entertainmentthat she and her sister “didn’t look enough alike to be interchangeable,” which fans noticed in one Bewitched Season 5 episode in particular.
“There was one episode in the entire eight years of the show where I had the mumps,” Murphy recalled. “They brought my sister in for that show [ “Samantha Fights City Hall”] where she had to slide up the sliding board backwards. The network got all these letters asking, 'Why did you replace Tabitha?'"
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