Tanya Roberts had one look, a wide and level stare, and 1980s genre cinema photographed it without ever asking what was behind it. Fantasy films read it as fearlessness, Bond read it as helplessness, and only a sitcom worked out it was funny.
Fi1m perspective
Tanya Roberts has one expression on screen and she holds it. It is a wide, level, faintly astonished stare, and in the fantasy films of the early 1980s it reads as nerve: a woman looking at something monstrous without blinking. Put the same face in a thriller and it reads as someone waiting to be told what happens next. Most of her career in cinema turned on which of those two readings the film around her needed.
She trained at the Actors Studio and worked on the New York stage before television found her, replacing Shelley Hack for the last season of Charlie's Angels in 1980. That led to a run of leads in genre pictures: Kiri in The Beastmaster (1982), the title part in Sheena (1984), and then Stacey Sutton in A View to a Kill (1985), opposite Roger Moore in his last outing as Bond. It is the film of hers we have reviewed, and it is not a generous one. After it the work went largely to direct-to-video thrillers, until That '70s Show (1998–2004) gave her Midge Pinciotti and a new audience that knew her only from the sofa.
Stacey Sutton is the problem in miniature. Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson write her as a geologist and then give her nothing geological to do; she is there to be carried out of a fire-engine chase and a climax on the Golden Gate Bridge, and to shout Bond's name while it happens. Roberts plays what she is given. She is game about the physical business, as the fantasy films had already shown, and she has the stillness this series likes in its women, but the script leaves her nothing to think and she does not supply it. We watched the bridge sequence wanting to feel something for her and felt mainly embarrassment, because a woman with a doctorate has been reduced to a voice calling a man's name, and Roberts never lets us see that Stacey might mind.
That is the criticism that followed her: presence without interior, and typecasting to match. It is fair as far as it goes. It also asks a performer to mend a part the writers broke. The sitcom is the exception and it is telling. Midge Pinciotti is a suburban wife whose blankness is the joke, and the same stare that stranded her in San Francisco lands lines. Comedy could use what action cinema could only point a camera at.
She knew the shape of it herself. Cast in the Bond film, she said, "I sort of felt like every girl who’d ever been a Bond Girl had seen their career go nowhere, so I was a little cautious." She was right to be. Watch A View to a Kill for Walken and Grace Jones, and notice how little of it is hers.
Biography
Tanya Roberts was an American actress. Born Victoria Leigh Blum in New York City on 15 October 1949, she studied at the Actors Studio before beginning her career in modelling and small roles.
She played Julie Rogers in the final season of the television series Charlie's Angels (1980–1981) and Stacey Sutton in the James Bond film A View to a Kill (1985). Other credits include Kiri in The Beastmaster (1982), the title role in Sheena (1984) and Midge Pinciotti in That '70s Show (1998–2004). She died in Los Angeles on 4 January 2021.
