Margaret Stewart Kennedy-Cairns, who left postwar Glasgow at nineteen with little to her name, crossed the Atlantic, and remade herself in Montreal as a model, a mother of four, and, in the eyes of her family, a lady, died peacefully there on November 5, 2026, surrounded by family. She was 97.
Her life spanned nearly a century and held more reinventions, heartbreaks, and triumphs than most people could imagine. Some people pass through life quietly. Margaret was not one of them.
Born in Glasgow in 1929, Margaret was one of seven children raised in the Garngad, one of the poorest districts in the city. Her father, Hugh Cairns, struggled with alcoholism and was in and out of prison; her mother, Helen Kennedy, died suddenly when Margaret was only six. Then came the war, and German bombs over Glasgow. Left largely to fend for themselves, the Kennedy-Cairns children relied on one another and did whatever it took to keep fed, in circumstances that asked far more of them than their years.
Yet it was there that the qualities that would carry her through life took root: resourcefulness, resilience, a fierce self-sufficiency, and an unshakeable instinct to provide for those who depended on her.
She came, too, from a line of remarkable, and remarkably headstrong, women. Her maternal grandmother, Helen Orr Kennedy, rose to become a senior leader—a Worthy Mistress—in Scotland’s women’s Orange Order. The staunchly Protestant Order forbade marriage to Catholics, so when her daughter Helen wed Hugh Cairns, an Irish Catholic immigrant, against the wishes of both families, it was a genuine scandal. The two sides kept their distance from then on, but Margaret would not. After her mother died, she ran away again and again to her grandmother’s house, a modest, respectable home that, after the tenements of the Garngad, must have seemed palatial. Each time, it was the Catholic side of the family that came to bring her back. It was an early sign of a girl who would go wherever she believed a better life lay, whatever lines stood in her way.
In her late teens, Margaret was studying to become a nun. For a motherless girl from the Garngad, the convent offered what little else did: an education, security, and a respectable way out. But it could never have held a spirit as restless and bright as hers. At nineteen she left the convent and instead crossed the Atlantic to begin a new life in Montreal with her fiancé, Henry, Canadian-born but also of Irish and Scottish parents, whom she had known only briefly. It left an ocean between her and the brothers and sisters with whom she had survived her childhood.
Throughout her twenties, she bore and raised three children within that first marriage, isolated in a new country with her own family an ocean away. It is hard to imagine how lonely those years must have been. Her husband suffered from a brain injury and was, by every account, a difficult man. Despite her young age, it was a burden she knew all too well; she had grown up in the shadow of a troubled father and now found herself living with one again. In the late 1950s she divorced him, a step that took real nerve for any woman of the time, and more still for one raised Catholic.
The years that followed were the hardest of her adult life. Not yet thirty, divorced, and with three young children to feed, Margaret worked as a clerk by day and cleaned offices by night. The resourcefulness and resilience that had carried a motherless girl through the Garngad now had a family to carry, and she did everything in her power to spare her children the poverty she had known. Though it stretched her means to the limit, she rented in Westmount, one of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, so that they could attend its best public schools. Along the way she had stints as a model, and it was easy to see why: she had striking Scottish looks, with vivid red hair, expressive features, and a smile that could light up a room.
At the turn of the 1960s she married Ted Liontos, a Greek photographer with dashing, James Bond good looks, and in May 1961 their daughter, Anthea, was born, Margaret’s youngest child. The marriage lasted only a few years, and before long she was once again raising her children on her own, now four of them.
Through the 1960s and 1970s she worked tirelessly to provide for her four children, often behind the counters of Montreal’s finest stores, among them Birks, the storied jeweller, where her magnetism made her a natural. Suitors were never in short supply, but any man who wanted Margaret without her children was soon shown the door; they came together or not at all. Remarkably for a single mother of the time, she eventually bought a house of her own in Westmount. With Ted’s help, Anthea went on to a private school, and in time became the first in the family to go to university, at McGill. In time she became a familiar face in the city’s anglophone society, holding her own among its best-connected families with an ease few would have traced back to a Glasgow tenement. It was, in part, a magnificent performance: none of her children’s friends ever guessed how close to the bone the family was living.
Those years brought a change of faith as well. In the 1970s, amid the Westmount circles where it had a loyal following, Margaret discovered Christian Science and became a devoted student of Mary Baker Eddy. Born into a religious divide she had never chosen, she had at last found a faith of her own, and it is easy to see why it spoke to her. Eddy taught that God is infinite Mind, and that sickness, fear, and lack are not the truth of a person but a mistaken way of seeing. To a woman who had known hunger as a girl and fought to keep four children fed, a faith that called lack an illusion, and trouble something to be seen through rather than endured, made perfect sense. In her later years she grew eager to share it, and a conversation with Margaret, whether with a grandson, a neighbour, or a nurse she had known for ten minutes, could soon turn to the healing power of right thinking.
Through all of it, her greatest devotion was to her family, and it was there that life asked the most of her. In the early 1980s she lost her son Colin and her daughter Helen, both in their twenties, within thirteen months of one another. No strength or determination could spare her that unspeakable grief. She carried it alongside everything else, and somehow kept her appetite for beauty, laughter, and the company of others.
Margaret never hesitated to put the people she loved before herself. When her daughter Anthea was raising a young son on her own while working in Manhattan, Margaret would not hear of leaving him to strangers. She left her beloved Montreal for New York City and helped raise her grandson, Sean, herself. It said a great deal about her that she gave up a life of her own so willingly for the people who mattered most.
In later life, her son Paul gifted her a small plot of land in her native Scotland, along with a certificate naming her Lady Margaret. She was touched by the thought but never entirely comfortable with the title, which struck her as faintly fraudulent. The irony was lost on no one else. She had become more of a lady than most people will ever meet, and she had needed no certificate to do it.
In her final years, age took from her the self-sufficiency she had always prized, and the loss was hard on a woman who had never once waited to be rescued. The people who loved her stayed close, eager to repay decades of her sacrifice with some of their own. But those years were only a small part of a much larger story.
She was glamorous, opinionated, endlessly sociable, and blessed with a personality that could fill a room before she’d properly entered it. She loved beautiful things, good conversation, and the pleasure of making an impression. She married four times. She was quick to laugh, occasionally quicker to anger, and possessed of a Scottish wit as sharp as her spectacularly stubborn opinions. She loved a practical joke, never more than at Christmas, when a little Tiffany box in a stocking might turn out to hold a set of false teeth or a few toenail clippings.
She also had a gift for turning an ordinary encounter into an occasion. Left on her own for a few hours on the Amalfi Coast, she came back the best of friends with a countess she had only just met. Family, friends, neighbours, and strangers alike found in her wisdom, warmth, and kindness, given freely and often just when it was needed. People tended to leave her company a little wiser, a little more cared for, and usually with a story to tell. Whether you knew her for years or met her once, Margaret was someone you remembered.
Music was another of her gifts. Blessed with a beautiful singing voice, she carried on a family tradition that also gave the world her niece, the Scottish singer Lulu. Margaret was rarely far from a song, and her voice filled the family home. She was still singing in her very last days, and for those who knew her, the sound of it will be among the most enduring memories of all.
Above all, Margaret loved her family, fiercely and loyally. Those closest to her knew a woman of wonderful contradictions: tender and tempestuous, elegant and irreverent, independent and deeply attached. She could be demanding, exasperating, and gloriously entertaining, often all in the same afternoon. But no one in her family ever had reason to doubt the depth of her love.
Her life carried her from the poverty of Glasgow to the elegance of mid-century Montreal. Along the way she had been a model, a clerk, an entrepreneur, a socialite and a grande dame, whatever she needed to be to survive and to care for those she loved. She was also a deeply devoted mother, nana, and woman of faith, and an irrepressible force of nature.
She was predeceased by her children Colin and Helen; her last partner, George Kendall; and her six brothers and sisters, Nellie, Betty, James, Davey, Hugh Jr., and Colin. She is survived by her son, Paul; her daughter, Anthea; and her grandson, Sean, who will carry her memory forward with love, laughter, and gratitude.
In accordance with her wishes, Margaret will be cremated following a private family ceremony, and her ashes scattered where she will join Colin and Helen once more.
It will come as no surprise that, even in her final days, her wit was as sharp as ever. When nurses explained that they needed to take medical images of her ribs, the former model asked, without missing a beat, “Am I being paid for these pictures?” Some things, it seems, never change.