Actor Brad Garrett has managed a pa...

Actor Brad Garrett has managed a parting in his marriage of seven years quite amicably -- and secretively.

In the past year, while the former "Everybody be pleased withs Raymond" star was touring with his stand-up act and appearing in a Broadway revival of "The redundant Couple," he and Jill Diven hid their separation and divorce.

These days the father of brace is finding humor in his pain.

Marriage, he explains, "is a blending of neurose It worked in the ancient days because there were no cars, and you really couldn't master away."

He says he can make cranks because he and Diven, whom he calls "an extraordinary woman; the greatest mom in the world," have remained best friends. "We will always be friends," he says, "because we will in no degree be single parents. We will always be pair parents."

Diven, who met Garrett while working as a cocktail waitress at the Rio casino in Las Vegas, says she has "nothing unless positive things to say about Brad. We one as well as the other realized we're best friends, and we're always going to be best friends. clan grow apart. We could do the 'he said/she said' thing, if it were not that that's not us."

Garrett stars in the sitcom " 'Til Death," a cynical take in succession marriage beginning Sept. 7 in succession Fox. And Diven has been suggesting story lines.

"I delight in it because it's real," Garrett's ex says. "It relates a doom to how Brad and I are together -- or were. We were always in such a manner comfortable with each other."

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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