They quietly separated six months ago but "remain best of friends," a rep tells PEOPLE

They had a 21-year age difference and endured a strain that would have sunk any other relationship, and still Barbara Hershey and Naveen Andrews continued as one of Hollywood’s more endearing couples.

But now comes word that it quietly ended for Hershey, 62, and Andrews, 41, six months ago. “They remain best of friends,” Andrews’s manager Renee Jennet tells PEOPLE.

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In 1998, long before Andrews would go on to star in TV’s Lost, the then-29-year-old actor met Hershey, then 50, a veteran of films such as Beaches and Hannah and Her Sisters, on the set of the obscure 1999 indie film Drowning on Dry Land.