Tanya Roberts, the actress who played Stacey Sutton in Bond movie, A View to a Kill, has died aged 65.
The actress played the role of geologist Stacey Sutton in the film that was Roger Moore’s final outing as the British superspy 007, with her character targeted by the villain Max Zorin, played by Christopher Walken.
"I'm devastated. She was brilliant and beautiful and I feel like a light has been taken away," her friend and representative Mike Pingel told The Hollywood Reporter.
“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 realised how much she meant to them.”
As well as playing a Bond girl, former model Roberts also landed roles in a handful of films that, although not huge hits at the time, went on to gain cult status among film fans.
Starring as Bambi in 1979 comedy Racquet, and as Kiri in 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, saw her become a TV star, and she went on to appear in popular US shows Fantasy Island and Love Boat.
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 the film once again later achieving cult status.
Although she achieved 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 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.”
