The paper is devoted to the development of the theory of self-adjoint operators in Krein spaces (J-self-adjoint operators) involving some additional properties arising from the existence of C-symmetries. We mainly focus on the recent notion of stable C-symmetry for J-self-adjoint extensions of a symmetric operator S. The general results involve boundary value techniques and reproducing kernel space methods, and they include an explicit functional model for the class of stable C-symmetries. Some of the results are specialized further by studying the case where S has defect numbers 〈2,2〉 in detail.