![]() What she really wanted, she explained in 1984, was a hit. Abandoned in the jungle as an infant and raised by African warriors, Sheena rode a zebra, which was clearly a horse painted black-and-white. ![]() She received star billing in Sheena: Queen of the Jungle (1984), by which time it was her turn to talk to the animals, at least telepathically. “It’s good versus evil,” she said, “and it’s a man who’s able to communicate with animals, and the animals help him fight all these bad guys, right?” She agreed to a nude Playboy photoshoot as publicity (“The pictures are full-length body shots draped over tigers, not at all trashy”) and played second fiddle in the movie to its star, Marc Singer. It was not until she had come out of Charlie’s Angels that she briefly established herself in cinema with two roles in the fantasy genre. After moving to Los Angeles in 1977, a smattering of film roles came her way, including The Private Files of J Edgar Hoover (1977) and James Toback’s thriller Fingers (1978), as well as some unpromising TV pilots). She studied acting with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg, and appeared in commercials and off-Broadway theatre. ![]() Roberts worked as a dance teacher and a model. Her older sister Barbara, also briefly an actor, married the psychedelic guru Timothy Leary in 1978. A year later, she met Barry Roberts, a psychology student and later a TV writer, in a cinema queue in New York she proposed to him in a subway station and they remained married until his death in 2006. She described herself as a “wild, rebellious kid” and told People magazine in 1981 that she had dropped out of school at 15, married “some guy” and “hitchhiked all over until his mother had it annulled”. Her mother was Dorothy (nee Smith), her father Oscar Blum, a pen salesman. “I look real Irish, but I have a Jewish brain,” said Roberts, who sometimes went by the name Tanya Leigh. She was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx, New York, to Irish-Jewish parents. The only tough part was coming into a situation where the other two girls were sick of the show and wanted to get out, and I was all excited.” With only Jaclyn Smith remaining from the original trio, the series was cancelled within a year of Roberts joining, though she remained buoyant about the whole role. What she had joined, however, was a sinking ship. Photograph: MGM/Allstar/UA/Eon Productions Tanya Roberts as Stacey Sutton and Roger Moore as James Bond in a scene from A View To a Kill, 1985. “There was someone before, there’ll be someone after you.” “That’s the way every job is,” she told the talk-show host Johnny Carson when he queried the show’s personnel changes. This hardly fazed Roberts, who had already made her name stepping into another actor’s shoes when she was cast in 1981 as Shelley Hack’s replacement on the fifth season of Charlie’s Angels, the hit series about a trio of glamorous female crimefighters. She was second choice for the part after the producers were unable to secure Priscilla Presley. ![]() Moore was 58 at the time, and looking somewhat creaky as he scaled the Golden Gate bridge during his final outing in the role of James Bond, while Roberts was 30 and having the time of her life commandeering a fire engine during a chase through San Francisco, albeit with a little help from bluescreen technology. ![]() Tanya Roberts, who has died aged 65 of sepsis, was already a film and television star when she was cast as a “Bond girl”, Stacey Sutton, opposite Roger Moore in A View to a Kill (1985). ![]()
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