Tanya Roberts Obituary | James bond

Tanya Roberts, 65, was already a movie and TV star when she was cast for “Bond girl”, Stacey Sutton, opposite Roger Moore in A View to a Kill (1985). Moore was 58 at the time and looked a little squeaky as he scaled the Golden Gate Bridge on his last outing as James Bond, while Roberts was 30 and had the time of his life to requisition a fire engine in a chase through San Francisco. , but with a little help from blue screen technology.

She was the second choice for the role after the film’s producers failed to get Priscilla Presley. It hardly scared Roberts, who had already made a name for herself as another actor when she was cast in 1981 as Shelley Hack’s replacement in the fifth season of Charlie’s Angels, the television series at hit on a trio of glamorous female crime fighters. “It’s the way every job is,” she told talk show host Johnny Carson when he called for the show’s staffing changes. “There was someone before, there will be someone after you.”

Her fees were $ 12,000 per episode and she was greeted with enthusiasm by her co-star Cheryl Ladd, who said, “She’s got a lot of ‘street’ in her, a perk that’s really fun to play.” Roberts described herself as “the real New York … I say what I think, but I think I’m sensitive.”

What she had joined, however, was a sinking ship. With only Jaclyn Smith remaining of the original trio, the series was canceled less than a year after Roberts joined, though she remained optimistic about the entire experience. “It gave me my big chance. The only hard part was getting into a situation where the other two girls were fed up with the show and wanted to go out, and I was all excited.

She was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx, New York, to Irish Jewish parents. “I look really Irish, but I have a Jewish brain,” said Roberts, who was sometimes called Tanya Leigh. His mother was Dorothy (née Smith), his father Oscar Blum, a pen seller. She described herself as a “wild, rebellious kid” and told People magazine in 1981 that she dropped out of school at age 15, married “a guy” and “hitchhiked all over the place until. ‘that his mother canceled it’.

A year later, she meets Barry Roberts, a psychology student and later television writer, in a movie line in New York; she proposed to him in a subway station and they remained married until her death in 2006. Her older sister Barbara, also briefly an actress, married psychedelic guru Timothy Leary in 1978.

Roberts worked as a dance teacher and model. She studied acting with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg, and appeared in commercials and off-off-Broadway theater. After moving to Los Angeles in 1977, a handful of film roles came to him, including The Private Files of J Edgar Hoover (1977) and James Toback’s thriller Fingers (1978), as well as some unpromising television pilots.

It wasn’t until she was on the other side of Charlie’s Angels that she briefly established herself in the movies with two roles in the fantasy genre. The first was The Beastmaster (1982). “It’s good versus evil,” she said, “and he’s a man who is able to communicate with animals, and animals help him fight all these bad guys, right? She accepted a nude Playboy photoshoot as a commercial (“The photos are photos of bodies draped over tigers, not at all trashy”) and played second fiddle in the film to her star, Marc Singer.

She was starred in Sheena: Queen of the Jungle (1984), when it was her turn to talk to animals, at least telepathically. Abandoned in the jungle as a child and raised by African warriors, Sheena rode a zebra, which was clearly a horse painted in black and white. What she really wanted, she explained in 1984, was “commercial success. If you’re in a hit, suddenly you’re a star whether or not you did the right thing.

But Sheena wasn’t that. Janet Maslin in The New York Times said of Roberts: “She’s in very good shape. Unfortunately, this is the best that can be said of his performance. Pauline Kael in The New Yorker noted that she “seems afraid to relax and come alive” but praised her for having “the face of a ballerina, a prodigious and muscular form, and a gazing and comical opacity. . She gazes into space with eyes as wonderfully empty as if they had been coated in pale blue chalk. She’s a walking and talking icon, and she’s fun to watch. “

Roberts had feared that A View to a Kill, his next film, was a curse. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, every girl that’s ever been in a Bond movie has never made a career after that.’ My agent said, “Do it, do it!” However, his fears turned out to be well founded and his cinematographic work was then limited to erotic thrillers with interchangeable titles: Night Eyes (1990), Legal Tender (1991), Sins of Desire (1993).

It was true that she could appear gullible and that she was inclined to make fun of him openly and chauvinistically. Carson, for example, plugged an awkward silence into their on-screen interview by asking, “Do you want to go to bed?”

Fortunately, she was lucky enough to shine when she was cast in 1998 as a regular on the sitcom That 70s Show. Her performance as the slow-to-adopt but increasingly unhappy Midge Pinciotti with her life as a housewife has proven that she isn’t a model herself.

Roberts retired from acting to nurse Barry when he became terminally ill. She is survived by her later partner, Lance O’Brien, and her sister.

• Tanya Roberts (Victoria Leigh Blum), actress, born October 15, 1955; passed away on January 4, 2021