Tanya Roberts, who died at age 65, was already a film and television star when she was cast as a “Bond girl”, Stacey Sutton, alongside Roger Moore in A View to a Kill (1985). Moore was 58 at the time and looked somewhat fragile as he climbed the Golden Gate Bridge during his last performance as James Bond, while Roberts was 30 and had fun driving a fire engine during a chase through San Francisco, albeit with a little help from blue screen technology.
She was the second choice for the role, after the film’s producers failed to secure Priscilla Presley. This hardly disturbed Roberts, who had already made his name by taking the place of another actor when he was cast in 1981 to replace Shelley Hack in the fifth season of Charlie’s Angels, the hit TV series about a trio of glamorous crime-fighting women. “Every job is like that,” she told talk show host Johnny Carson when he questioned the program’s personnel changes. “There was someone before, there will be someone after you.”
Her fee was $ 12,000 per episode, and she was greeted with enthusiasm by her co-star Cheryl Ladd, who said, “She has a lot of ‘street’ to her, an advantage that is a lot of fun to play.” Roberts described himself as “the real New York … I say what I’m thinking, but I think I’m sensitive”.
What she joined, however, was a sinking ship. With only Jaclyn Smith remaining from the original trio, the series was canceled a year after Roberts’ entry, although she remained excited about the whole experience. “It gave me my big chance. The only difficult part was getting to a situation where the other two girls were tired of the show and wanted to leave, and I was really excited.
She was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx, New York, to Irish Jewish parents. “I look like a real Irishman, but I have a Jewish brain,” said Roberts, who was sometimes known by the name of Tanya Leigh. His mother was Dorothy (nee Smith), his father Oscar Blum, a pen salesman. She described herself as a “rebellious and rebellious child” and told People magazine in 1981 that she dropped out of school at age 15, married “a guy” and “hitchhiked until her mother canceled”.
A year later, she met Barry Roberts, a psychology student and then a television writer, in a New York movie queue; she proposed to him at a subway station and they remained married until her death in 2006. Her older sister, Barbara, also briefly an actor, 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, several film roles came his way, including Private Archives by J Edgar Hoover (1977) and James Toback’s thriller Fingers (1978), as well as some promising TV pilots.
It wasn’t until she was on the other side of Charlie’s Angels that she briefly established herself in the cinema 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 can communicate with animals, and animals help him fight all these bad guys, right?” She agreed to a Playboy nude photo shoot as advertising (“The photos are full-length photos about tigers, nothing rubbish”) and played the second violin in the film for her star, Marc Singer.
It was highlighted 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 “a commercial success. If you are successful, you are suddenly a star, regardless of whether you have done well or not. “
But Sheena was not. Janet Maslin in the New York Times said of Roberts: “She is in very good shape. This, unfortunately, is the best that can be said of its performance. ”Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker, noted that she“ seems to be afraid of letting go and coming to life ”, but praised her for having“ a ballerina’s face, a slender and muscular prodigious form and an impressive comic book opacity. She looks into space with eyes as exquisitely empty as if they were painted with light blue chalk. She is an icon who walks and talks and is fun to watch. “
Roberts feared that A View to a Kill, his next film, could be a curse. “I thought, ‘Oh God, every girl who’s ever been in a Bond movie has never had a career afterwards.’ My agent said, ‘Do it, do it!’ ”His fears turned out to be well-founded, and his film work after that was limited to erotic thrillers with interchangeable titles: Night Eyes (1990), Legal Tender (1991), Sins of Desire (1993).
It was true that she could appear credulous and tended to be ridiculed in an open and chauvinistic way. Carson, for example, blocked an awkward silence in his on-screen interview by asking, “Do you want to go to bed?”
Fortunately, she had a chance to shine when she was cast in 1998 as a regular on the sitcom That 70s Show. Her intelligent acting as Midge Pinciotti, slow to understand but increasingly dissatisfied with her life as a housewife, proved that she was not an idiot herself.
Roberts stopped acting to look after Barry when he became terminally ill. She leaves her subsequent partner, Lance O’Brien, and her sister.
• Tanya Roberts (Victoria Leigh Blum), actor, born October 15, 1955; died on January 4, 2021