Shelley Smith, an actor and model who was best known for her work on "The Associates," has died. She was 70 at the time of her death, as Fox News reported.
Michael Maguire, her husband, said in a video on Facebook that she died of a heart attack. But he later told Fox News Digital that Smith had been having trouble breathing for a long time.
Maguire said that Smith got pneumonia while she was modeling in Africa at the start of her career, and she kept getting sick.
"She went on to have pneumonia over 10 times in her life. In the last year, it just started going downhill," Maguire shared, noting that a double-lung transplant was Smith's only option.
"The problem is she was kind of frail already when we started thinking about that. And, you know, the failure rate of the operation itself is like 20%…. It's an incredibly difficult recovery and then you have to take drugs the rest of your life," he went on.
"And if you're lucky, you get a couple of years out of it. So she decided not to do that," he said.
Last week, Maguire shared his loss on Facebook, writing, "My dear, sweet angel Shelly Smith passed peacefully [August 8] at 2:20 PM. Her children, Nicky and Miranda Nathan and I were at her side and holding her hand and kissing her head and singing to her and telling her how much we loved her."
He told Fox News Digital that Shelley spent her whole life trying to help people.
In addition to "The Associates," Smith starred in "For Love and Honor" and appeared on prominent television programs such as "The Love Boat" and "Murder, She Wrote."
Additionally, Smith appeared on several celebrity game programs, such as "Super Password."
Maguire and Smith recently observed their eighteenth wedding anniversary. They met through mutual acquaintances and wed in 2005.
"We had both gone through relatively tough divorces and were, you know, a little gun shy… We were just so well-connected," Maguire told Fox News Digital.
"And then we had a lot of parallels in our life because she was a supermodel and had been very successful, and then she went into acting, and then she went back to school," he added.
Maguire is a Tony Award-winning actor who quit acting to pursue further education and become a divorce attorney.
