Tanya Roberts, the actress who played Stacey Sutton in Bond movie A View to a Kill, has died. She was 65.
Roberts was admitted to hospital in Los Angeles in late December after a fall, and was initially reported to have died over the new year weekend following a statement from her publicist, Mike Pingel, which was later retracted.
However, Pingel has now confirmed that the star died on Monday evening from a urinary tract infection, which spread to her kidney, gallbladder, liver and bloodstream. Pingel said her long-time partner, Lance O’Brien, had received a call from the hospital confirming her death late on Monday.
The actress played the role of geologist Stacey Sutton in the film that was Roger Moore's final outing as the British super-spy 007, with her character targeted by the villain Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken.
As well as playing a Bond girl, Roberts, also a former model, landed roles in a handful of films that, although not huge hits at the time, went on to gain cult status. Starring as Bambi in the 1979 comedy Racquet, and as Kiri in the 1982 fantasy The Beastmaster, won her a legion of fans in retrospect.
On the small screen, winning the role of Julie Rogers in the final season of Charlie's Angels made her a TV star, and she went on to appear in popular US shows Fantasy Island and Love Boat, as well as in That '70s Show, in which she played Midge Pinciotti.
Roberts also won the lead role in the 1984 adventure Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, in which she played a female version of Tarzan years before all-female reboots of fan-favourite films became Hollywood's go-to, with that movie once again later achieving cult status.
Although she enjoyed global fame as Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill, the actress once revealed that she had been reluctant to take on the role, owing to the "Bond girl curse", which subsequent actresses have also spoken of.
"They sort of think you're some dumb, glamorous broad, so it's difficult," she told the UK's Daily Mail in 2015. "And I think that is the reason most Bond girls don't go on to have careers after they have done the movie because people just don't take them seriously, and I guess they shouldn't because it's so tongue-in-cheek, you know what I mean?
“I’ve made a lot of good choices and a lot of bad choices, and that’s part of life. Whether you’re really successful or moderately successful, I’m sure that to get there you have made some bad decisions and good decisions on some level, but that’s how I see life. You can't go through life defeated, it's just trial and error.”
