FOR a brief few hours it was a story that consumed the celebrity-driven news agenda and millions of people around the word read and no doubt some sniggered at the story of how actress Tanya Roberts had been declared dead only for her partner to be told live on television on Monday that she was actually still in the land of the living.
Only just, however, for yesterday brought confirmation that Roberts really did die, succumbing to organ failure at the age of 65 late on Monday night.
The unfortunate manner of her death made Roberts briefly famous once again. Originally a model born Victoria Leigh Blum in New York, back in the 1980s she starred in Charlie’s Angels for one season before her best known role as Stacey Sutton opposite Roger Moore as James Bond in A View To a Kill.
Other film roles were largely forgettable but she enjoyed television success in the late 1990s as the character Midge Pinciotti in the sitcom That ‘70s Show. She left the series to care for her dying husband, screenwriter Barry Roberts.
It was her partner Lance O’Brien who genuinely believed he held in her arms when she “died” on Sunday and mistakenly informed her agent Mike Pingel that Roberts had passed away. Yesterday, however, there was no doubting the sad news of her death.
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