TANYA ROBERTS

5 Jan

(15 October 1955 – 4 January 2021)

Tanya Roberts staked her position in pop cultural history by being both a Charlie’s angel and a Bond girl – and, less meaningfully, by taking the title role in John Guillermin's Sheena: Queen of the Jungle. Born Victoria Leigh Blum, Tanya (as we shall call her) was born in the Bronx in New York and, being frightfully pretty, dreamed of becoming a fashion model. However, having hitchhiked her way around the US at the age of 15, she went all Method and enrolled at the Actors' Studio in New York. So she went from TV ads for Ultra Brite to weightier material off-Broadway with plays like Picnic and Antigone. She got her big break when she was cast as the streetwise Julie Rogers in the last season of Charlie’s Angels (1980–1981), leading to leads in The Beastmaster (1982) and Sheena (1984). She then played the ballsy earth scientist Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill (1985), opposite Roger Moore. After all that, Tanya landed a recurring role in 81 episodes of the sitcom That '70s Show (1998–2004) alongside Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher. For fourteen years (1978-1992) she was also the sister-in-law of the psychedelic drug advocate Timothy Leary, who was married to her older sister, Barbara. Her death was confirmed by a representative of the actress on 3 January 2021, but then rescinded. The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center refused to comment on the state of her animation, due to “patient privacy laws.” However, a day later, her death was reported a second time, from sepsis. She was 65.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

TANYA ROBERTS

BARBARA SHELLEY

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER