Spencer Margaret Richmond is far easier to find on paper than to know in person. There is a public record of her wedding, her divorce, her daughter’s birth, and a baby clothing line that once carried her name. Almost all of it exists because of her family, not because of anything she set out to make public.
She grew up surrounded by working actors and filmmakers, among them her mother, a household television name, and her father, an award-winning cinematographer. Out of everyone in that orbit, she is the one who built almost no public identity of her own.
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Who is Spencer Margaret Richmond?
Spencer Margaret Richmond is an American fashion designer, born December 4, 1985, in Los Angeles. She is the daughter of Charlie’s Angels actress Jaclyn Smith and cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond, and she was married to actor and filmmaker Fran Kranz from 2015 to 2021. She is known mainly for a baby clothing line she designed with her mother. She has rarely spoken about her own life in public.
Her parents: Jaclyn Smith and Anthony B. Richmond
Jaclyn Smith and Anthony Richmond married in 1981 and divorced in 1989, when Spencer was still a young child. The two of them stood on opposite sides of celebrity.
Smith was famous twice over, first as one of the original Charlie’s Angels, then as the face of a Kmart clothing brand that, by the trade publication WWD‘s accounting, sold more than 100 million items and earned $250 million to $300 million a year at its height. Richmond worked behind the camera, recognized within the film industry more than by the public. He won a BAFTA in 1973 for Don’t Look Now, shot several films for director Nicolas Roeg, and in 2024 received a lifetime achievement award from the British Society of Cinematographers.
Her immediate family stays close to that world:
- Mother: Jaclyn Smith, actress and fashion entrepreneur
- Father: Anthony B. Richmond, BAFTA-winning cinematographer
- Brother: Gaston Richmond, who works in film camera and production departments
- Half-brothers: George and Jonathan Richmond, from her father’s side
- Godmother: Kate Jackson, her mother’s Charlie’s Angels co-star, which Smith confirmed in a 1986 interview
After the divorce, Smith married Dr. Brad Allen, who became Spencer’s stepfather.
Marriage to Fran Kranz and a daughter, Bea
Spencer married Fran Kranz on August 15, 2015. Kranz was an established actor by then, known to television audiences as Topher Brink on Joss Whedon’s series Dollhouse and to horror fans from The Cabin in the Woods. Their only child, a daughter named Bea, was born on September 17, 2016.
Bea’s birth led directly to the project Spencer is most often associated with.
The baby clothing line, Spencer by Jaclyn Smith
The year after Bea was born, Spencer and her mother launched a baby clothing line together called Spencer by Jaclyn Smith. It arrived in 2017 as a layette collection, clothes for newborns up to about a year old, sold through Kmart and later Sears.
The timing was unusual. By 2017, Kmart had shrunk from roughly 2,500 stores in the mid-1990s to a few dozen. Jaclyn Smith’s original collection, introduced in 1985, had long been one of the few reasons shoppers still came in. When Smith’s Kmart contract expired in July 2021, she moved her brand on, first through a licensing deal and later to HSN. The infant line with her daughter’s name did not appear to continue past that point. Spencer’s one real public venture ended around the same time her mother’s decades-long run at Kmart did.
The divorce from Fran Kranz
Court records in Los Angeles show that Spencer filed for divorce on July 6, 2020, and that judgment was entered on February 4, 2021.
Those dates overlap with the period her ex-husband spent making and promoting his first film as a director. While the case moved through the courts, Kranz was finishing Mass, a drama about two sets of parents who meet after a school shooting, which he spent roughly two years researching and writing. It premiered at Sundance in late January 2021, days before the divorce was final, and later won the Robert Altman Award at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards, with a nomination for his screenplay. He spent that period in public, accepting recognition for the work. Richmond has never said anything publicly about the end of the marriage, or about much else.
A life kept off the record
Everything verifiable about her traces back to someone else. The marriage and the divorce live in court files. The clothing line was her mother’s company. Her one television appearance, in the late 1990s, was made for a documentary about Jaclyn Smith, and even her daughter’s birth reached the public mainly through the grandmother who posts the photos.
People born this close to celebrity usually try to turn it into something of their own. She went the other way and has stayed there for forty years. What the public is left with is a detailed outline and almost no sense of the person inside it. Nothing on the record suggests she ever wanted it any other way.
