American actress Tanya Roberts has died at the age of 65. She co-starred with Sir Roger Moore in A View to a Kill as Stacy Sutton and co-starred with V‘s Marc Singer in The Beastmaster. She was private detective Julie Rogers in Charlie’s Angels, and she starred as Sheena, Queen of the Jungle in the movie Sheena.

Tanya Roberts was born Victoria Leigh Blum on October 15, 1955, in The Bronx, New York City, NY. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she passed away Sunday, January 3, 2021 in Los Angeles, CA. She was walking her dogs on Thursday, December 24, 2020 when she collapsed and was rushed to Cedar-Sinai Hospital. A cause of death has not been released yet, other than she did not die of COVID-19.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Roles

• Nancy Ullman in The Last Victim (1976)
• Bachemath in Greatest Heroes of the Bible (1979)
• Kiri in The Beastmaster (1982)
• Amanda Parsons in Fantasy Island (1982)
• Angelica in Hearts and Armour (1983)
• Sheena in Sheena (1984)
• Stacy Sutton in A View to a Kill (1985)

Roberts began as a model, just like her Charlie’s Angels character (the only angel not to have been a policewoman first before going to work for the Charles Townsend Detective Agency). She began her acting career in 1976, with the horror movie The Last Victim, also called Forced Entry. Her greatest success was in the Eighties, but she had a total of forty-one roles over twenty-nine years. Her final role was as Ellie Palmer in Barbershop.

Non-Genre Roles

• Juliie Roberts in Charlie’s Angels (1981)
• Midge Pinciotti in That Seventies Show (2004)
• Ellie Palmer in Barbershop (2005)

Voice Acting Roles

• Regan Madsen in The Pandora Directive (1996)
• Toni G. in The Blues Brothers Animated Series (1997)
• Marsha in The Angry Beavers
• Author in Disney’s Fillmore (2003)

Ms. Roberts was married twice. She was briefly married as a teenager, but that union was annulled. She was married to scriptwriter Barry Roberts from 1974 to 2006. She is survived by her sister Barbara Chase (Sheila in The Ghosts of Hanley House) and nephew Zach Leary.

She studied her craft at the Actors Studio with Lee Stasberg and Tony-winner Uta Hagen, but will perhaps be best remembered, for better or worse, for her ingenue roles.

… Except That She’s Not Actually Dead.

As an obituary writer, I don’t need to write retractions often, but the reports of Tanya Roberts’ death are, as the saying goes, “greatly exaggerated.” As Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Now, mostly dead is slightly alive.” Tanya Roberts is not in the best of health, but the person who informed her agent that she had passed on, was fortunately mistaken as to her condition, according to TVLine.

SCIFI.radio apologizes for the error (we got fooled along with everybody else) and we wish Ms. Roberts a full recovery.

… Except Now She Actually Is.

After the premature report of her death by both her rep and her POSSLQ, she is actually now completely dead. She reportedly passed away at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and had been fighting a severe non-COVID-19 infection while finally claimed her life.

Her partner, Lance O’Brien, told the gossip site that he received a call from her doctor around 9 p.m. Monday that Roberts had died.

The confusion stemmed from Roberts’ final moments after her publicist, Mike Pingel, prematurely announced her death Sunday. The snafu arose from an apparent misunderstanding between O’Brien and Pingel.

“[Pingel] goes, ‘What happened?’ And I say, ‘I just said goodbye to Tanya, and I got to see her beautiful eyes one last time.’ And after that, I’m just blubbering,” O’Brien recalled.

“Next thing I know, TMZ, OMG, is on my cellphone.”

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