Tanya Roberts
Tanya Roberts is an actor, born 1949.
Tanya Roberts joined Charlie's Angels for its final season in 1980, which is a strange way to arrive. The hit was already four years old and visibly ending, and she got one year of it. What that year bought her was the early 1980s, when she was cast almost entirely on presence and the offers came in fast.
The run that followed is a tour of genres that were about to disappear. Kiri in The Beastmaster (1982) is sword and sorcery at the height of the boom. Sheena (1984) is a jungle adventure built around a comic strip and around her. Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill (1985) put her in a Bond film, which in 1985 was still about the largest audience an actor could reach. None of the three is a good film, and that is not entirely her doing. Each was built to sell an image, hers included, and none of them handed her a character with much interior life. She was better than the material, which is a sentence that follows a great many actors marketed as sex symbols in that decade.
The rest is more interesting for being unexpected. There is horror at the start, Becky in Tourist Trap (1979), and erotic thrillers at the far end, Sins of Desire (1993). And then, more than a decade after the Bond film, she found the best-liked part of her career on television: Midge Pinciotti on That '70s Show from 1998, a sitcom mother played with a comic obliviousness that none of the 1980s roles had bothered to ask for. Roberts died in 2021.
Movies (10)
TV (3)
Where to start with Tanya Roberts
For the version of Tanya Roberts most people actually enjoy, go straight to That '70s Show. Midge is a small part written as a joke, and Roberts plays her with a serene, unbothered comic timing that makes her funnier than the writing, and it is the only role here that lets her be light on purpose.
Then take the 1980s in order of ambition. The Beastmaster is the best made of the three big genre pictures and the one that has aged into a real cult favourite. A View to a Kill is the largest, and worth seeing for scale rather than for anything it gives her. Sheena should be saved for an evening when a wildly misjudged 1984 adventure film sounds appealing, because that is exactly what it is.
Tourist Trap is the surprise, a genuinely unsettling low-budget horror from 1979 and the best film on this page. Charlie's Angels is where the story starts.