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.”
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
