Tanya Roberts, 'A View To A Kill' and 'That 70s Show' star, dies at 65

Actress Tanya Roberts, star of movies like A View To A Kill and US sitcom That 70s Show, has died at the age of 65.

According to reports on TMZ, she collapsed on Christmas Eve after walking her dogs.

She was taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital, where she was put on a ventilator, but her condition did not improve and she died yesterday.

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TMZ adds that it's not believed that her death was COVID-19 related, and she was not ill in the days prior.

“I’m devastated. She was brilliant and beautiful and I feel like a light has been taken away. To say she was an angel would be at the top of the list. She was the sweetest person you’d ever meet and had a huge heart. She loved her fans, and I don’t think she realized how much she meant to them,” her representative and friend Mike Pingel told The Hollywood Reporter.

Born Victoria Leigh Blum in New York, she began a modelling career as a teenager, before moving into off-Broadway productions after studying at the iconic Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen.

She made her movie debut in the 1975 horror movie Forced Entry, alongside Carrie and Robocop star Nancy Allen, before taking on the role of Julie Rogers for the fifth season of Charlie's Angels in 1980, replacing the departing Shelley Hack on the show.

Roberts then went on to play Kiri in Don Coscarelli's cult fantasy The Beastmaster in 1982, followed by roles in movies like fantasy movies Hearts and Armour and Sheena: Queen of the Jungle, though the latter earned her Razzie nomination at the time.

In 1985, she starred opposite Roger Moore's 007 in A View To A Kill, playing geologist and whistle-blower Stacey Sutton, who locked horns with Christopher Walken's maniacal industrialist Max Zorin.

She was perhaps best known for her work on TV, however, having notched up roles in shows like Fantasy Island, The Love Boat and Burke's Law.

In 1998, she began a long-running role as Midge Pinciotti in That 70s Show, alongside emerging talents like Topher Grace, Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis and Laura Prepon.

Initially portrayed as the ditzy, hippy mom, and subject of the teen fantasies of Topher Grace’s Eric and his friends, she later became something a feminist role model.

She left the show in 2001, after her husband, screenwriter Barry Roberts, who she had met and married while studying acting in New York in 1974, became ill.

He died in 2006.

Coscarelli, who directed her in The Beastmaster, is among those who have paid tribute.