Charlie’s Angels and That ’70s Show were two of Tanya Roberts’s most famous shows. She was one of the funniest and sexiest actresses of her day.
Sadly, there was a lot of confusion about her abrupt death because her partner erroneously told people about it. This made the loss of this energetic person even weird.
In the 1980s, Tanya Roberts, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd were the stars of the American TV show “Charlie’s Angels.”
Before we discuss about the weird things that happened when Tanya Roberts died, let’s take a moment to acknowledge all the great things she done for movies.
In a world where her legacy seems to be going away, looking more closely at her tremendous career demonstrates how truly amazing she was. And I’m sure she made a lot of people who are reading this very happy.
Going away from home
Tanya Roberts was born Victoria Leigh Blum in 1949 and grew up in the harsh Bronx section of New York City. The child with ice-blue eyes lived in a broken-down house with her mother and older sisters. Roberts had a humble life, but she dreamed of wearing nice clothes, riding horses, living in a beautiful house, and shopping in limos. She wanted to be a Hollywood celebrity more than anything else.
She was only 15 when she bravely ran away to chase her dreams. This happened after her family moved to Toronto, where a terrible occurrence made Roberts stay away from them. One day, not long after her father’s death, Tanya felt like the walls were closing in on her.
She chose to leave home at that point. After a violent dispute with her mom, Roberts packed her things and moved to a flat in the Village, a neighborhood in Toronto. She taught “old guys” how to dance and generated money by doing so.
Not long after that, she met another boy named Colin who had also dropped out of school. She loved him immediately away.
“It just happened.” It was a small, random event. Colin came from Canada, was two years older than me, had dropped out of school, and wasn’t doing anything. It started out as a love story but ended up as hate. We were never friends. We didn’t get along at all. But you know I loved him. I was like a butterfly. I would say, “Oh my God!” when I saw him. I answered the heart’s pounding.
Tied the knot in secrecy
They were dating for seven months and got married without telling anyone. They moved to New York together, but Colin’s mother broke up the marriage. Roberts and Colin were too young and didn’t have their parents’ permission.
Roberts didn’t inform her mom about the wedding because she didn’t want to scare her. Soon later, Roberts’s romance with Colin ended, but she met another man who would change her life forever.
Tanya Roberts was in New York City to pursue her acting career when she met Barry Roberts while waiting in line for a movie. He drove a truck and earned $30 a week. She fell in love with him right away.
Tanya asked Barry to marry her at a subway stop, and they got married soon after in 1973. At first, her husband intended to be a psychologist, but he dropped out of school to work on ideas for a number of TV networks.
On March 3, 1981, actress Tanya Roberts and her husband Barry Roberts traveled to the 21st Annual International Broadcasting Awards at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
The two moved to Hollywood and promised to live as normally as they could.
“You know you’ve got the right guy when you can sit at home with him on a Saturday night, just you and him and pizza,” Tanya stated in 1980.
Tanya and Barry lived happily and peacefully in their secret mansion in the Hollywood Hills for most of their life. It was quiet and private.
In 2015, Tanya told Closer Weekly, “Living here is like living in the country, but civilization is close by when I need it.” “This is the house I’ve always wanted.”
A spell on the angels of Charlie
Tanya Roberts grew raised on the streets of the Bronx, which helped her obtain the role of Julie Roberts, a street-smart woman, in Charlie’s Angels. Before that, she had already built a name for herself as a model in TV ads and had important roles in off-Broadway musicals like Picnic and Antigone.
People didn’t really pay attention to her until the summer of 1980, though.
Tanya was chosen from almost 2,000 individuals to replace Shelley Hack on the popular detective show Charlie’s Angels, which was having difficulties garnering viewers.
The creators felt that the vibrant 26-year-old and her co-stars, Jaclyn Smith, the last original “Angel,” and Cheryl Ladd, would lend new life to the show. Tanya was determined to help the performance go better because she was so brilliant and charming.
“Everyone seems really excited to be on set.” We all work together. We need to get along well since it shows in our work. I think it’s hard to do a classy presentation every week for five years with three girls. “It’s not Shakespeare, but I think people look forward to seeing something new every week,” Roberts said in 1981 to The Daily Herald-Tribune.
Roberts, who considered herself a “workaholic,” couldn’t bring the show back, and Charlie’s Angels was canceled in 1981.
But her hard work and skill opened up new doors in her career.
Nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award
Robert went on to star in a number of cult classics after Charlie’s Angels, including The Beastmaster (1982), Sheena: Queen of the Jungle (1984), Body Slam (1987), and Night Eyes (1990).
She is well known for her roles as Stacey Sutton in the 1985 James Bond movie A View to a Kill and as Midge Pinciotti on That ’70s Show, where she charmed audiences from 1998 to 2004.
Tanya Roberts was in A View to a Kill alongside Roger Moore, which was a major hit at the box office. But critics weren’t quite convinced. Moore himself said he was dissatisfied looking back since it was his worst Bond movie because it had so much blood and violence.
People said the 57-year-old Hollywood veteran was too old for the part. He also made fun of the age discrepancy by saying he was embarrassed to find out he was older than Roberts’ mother. He joked in an interview in December 2007, “I was only about four hundred years too old for the part.”
After her first Bond movie, Tanya also got a lot of bad reviews. It’s fascinating that she wasn’t the first choice for the role. At first, producers intended to cast Priscilla Presley, but she was busy with her Dallas contract. They even thought about Barbara Bach, who used to be a Bond girl, but in the end they went with Tanya Roberts. She worked hard, yet she still got a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress. But she lost the award to Linda Blair, who was in Night Patrol.
Her husband passed away.
A lot of younger people know Tanya Roberts as Midge Pinciotti from the hit TV sitcom That ’70s sitcom. She was a fan favorite on the show, but she had to leave after the third season.
Why? She wanted to be there for her husband Barry because he was really unwell. Barry died at the age of 60 after a long battle with encephalitis, which causes brain tissue to swell and can affect a person’s personality, trigger seizures, and make them unable to move.
Tanya and Barry were there for each other from their wedding in 1973 till Barry died in 2006. The couple didn’t have any kids.
A death that isn’t clear
It was terribly sad that Tanya Roberts’s husband Barry died in 2006. After that, she fell in love with Lance O’Brien. They met while Tanya was a spokesmodel for the Las Vegas resort Tahiti Village. They appeared like they would be together forever, but in December 2020, their lives altered in a terrible way.
Tanya was 71 years old, yet she was still full of life. People knew her for trekking up the Hollywood Hills every day. There were no evidence of any major health issues, and they were “as healthy as a horse.” But just before Christmas, Tanya’s lower intestines started to hurt and she had problems breathing.
When she started to feel these symptoms while walking, she thought it might be COVID-19. She fell the next morning and couldn’t get up. They took her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital right away.
Tanya’s doctors revealed that she had a bad urinary tract infection that had gotten worse and progressed into sepsis. The illness slowly spread to her liver, kidneys, and gallbladder, and in the end, it made her organs stop working.
Tubes in her nose
“She was talking when I called 911.” O’Brien told the Daily Mail, “The next thing I know, she’s in intensive care on oxygen and very sick.”
When O’Brien eventually saw Tanya, she was barely awake and on a ventilator. The famous actress, who used to look great on screen, could only blink when her spouse was around.
He said, “When she saw me and I was there, I saw her eyes open.” “I felt good.” I said, “Look, her eyes are opening.” Her eyes are opening. “They told me that’s just a reflex,” O’Brien said to Inside Edition.
It’s really bad that Tanya’s last days were both sad and crazy.
O’Brien was angry at how the hospital was treating Tanya. “They were calling her Victoria,” he said. “She hasn’t been called that since she was a youngster. She had tubes in her throat and nose. It was so busy that I can’t even begin to explain how dreadful and horrible it was.
“I think COVID had a lot to do with it,” O’Brien stated. “When you called the hospital, it sounded like something from the TV show M.A.S.H.”
Why a person died
Tanya’s condition deteriorated worse, and on January 3, 2021, she was no longer on life support. On January 4, the famous person died.
But things became a lot worse when she died. At first, Tanya’s publicist said she had died too soon, which made a lot of people unsure.
During a live interview with Inside Edition, O’Brien learned that she was still alive, which was strange.
“Are you really saying that she’s still alive?” When the hospital contacted him in the middle of the interview, O’Brien exclaimed, “Hello?” He said through sobs, “The hospital says she’s still alive.” The ICU staff is calling me.
In the end, all the confusion melted gone and it was clear that Tanya Roberts had died. But it wasn’t the end of the inaccuracies; many sources incorrectly reported she was 65 when she died. Even though she is 71 years old, several news media still haven’t fixed this mistake, even though three years have gone by.
Her last will
Tanya Roberts’s handwritten note provides a very personal and sad glimpse at her last thoughts. Fox News adds that Roberts left her whole inheritance, which is worth more than $3 million, to her long-term partner, Lance O’Brien. She penned the letter using both her real name, Victoria Blum, and her Hollywood moniker, Tanya Roberts.
Tanya said, “I have no reason to live,” and she also made it clear that her sister Barbara Leary and her nephew Zack Leary would not get any of her money.
Instead, Roberts donated everything to O’Brien, but the letter makes it sound like their relationship wasn’t as romantic as people thought.
“I want my best friend, Lance O’Brien, to have my house and everything in it. The actress stated, “I also want to leave my two dogs and my Pension Plan check to Lance O’Brien,” as evidenced in images that Page Six got.
When she said their relationship wasn’t working, that part of the note made me the saddest. “I know you don’t love me, but you’ve been a good friend, and I’m thankful for that,” she wrote. “Don’t feel bad about this. Have a good life. “I was always [too] sensitive to live in this world.”
The last chapter of Tanya Roberts’ life may have been sad and perplexing, but it’s important to remember how much light she poured into the world.
You can see that she was not only incredibly beautiful but also quite independent in old images of her, whether she was on set, in her famous roles, or just hanging around behind the scenes.
When she was just 15, she knew exactly what she wanted from life. After playing a Charlie’s Angel, Hollywood thought she would never die, but what really set her apart was how she handled fame. Some people would have expected that Tanya’s climb to stardom would be full of tragedy, bad roles, or failed marriages, but she chose a different path.
She loved her husband Barry Roberts so much that she resigned her job to take care of him while he was unwell. That kind of commitment and strength says a lot about the kind of person she was.
We remember how graceful and strong she was in those early images and times, and how much she meant to her fans and family.