Tanya Roberts, the glamorous actor who starred in the 1985 Bond film A View to A Kill with Roger Moore, as well as one of the lead roles in the final series Charlie’s Angels, has died at the age of 65. Her representative confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter and said she collapsed while walking near her home in Los Angeles.
In A View to a Kill, Roberts gets an important role as geologist Stacey Sutton, Bond’s main love interest and an important ally in the fight against Christopher Walken’s malicious industrialist Max Zorin. By then, she had already consolidated her on-screen appeal by appearing in the detective series Charlie’s Angels in the 1980-81 season, and took over Shelley Hack as one of the three title characters.
Born Victoria Leigh Blum, Roberts cut a career as a model before moving to Hollywood with her husband, Barry Roberts. She has landed a number of small roles, including James Toback’s drama Fingers from 1978 and Tourist Trap. After winning the role of Charlie’s Angels, her profile increased, and she was released as slave girl Kiri in the cult fantasy horror The Beastmaster (1982) and as the lead role in the Tarzan adventure Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. in 1984 and which also became a cult film despite its disastrous initial reception.
Roberts does not like the label ‘Bond girl’, and told the Daily Mail that it’s her ‘dumb, glamorous broad’ and that ‘why most Bond girls do not have careers [is] because people just do not take them seriously ”. But she said she did not regret taking the role: ‘I did not know what I know now at the time, and to be honest, who would turn down the role? No one would … I was very young and did what I wanted to make the right choice. ‘
A View to a Kill did not, as Roberts rightly suggested, lead to a career transformation: she starred in ‘erotic thrillers’ such as Night Eyes, Inner Sanctum and Sins of Desire, and TV series such as Hot Line (also featuring’ an “erotic” slant).
In 1998, however, she played a long role in the retro sitcom That ’70s Show, as the dim light bulb Midge Pinciotti, which appeared in more than 80 episodes. Her husband’s terminal illness, and subsequent death in 2006, led her to retire from acting.