Actor Tanya Roberts breathed her last on Monday night after complications from a urinary tract infection, her publicist, Mike Pingel told The Washington Post. She was 65.
Roberts had been hospitalised at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles since late December, according to the outlet, leading to a false news of her death being reported on Sunday. Pingel clarified earlier Monday that she hadn’t died over the weekend.
Following this, in a statement issued Tuesday, Pingel stated that Roberts’s longtime partner, Lance O’Brien, had received a call from the hospital confirming her death late the previous night. Her urinary infection had spread to her kidney, gallbladder, liver and bloodstream.
Widespread confusion over the status of Roberts’s health stemmed from Pingel confirming her death to members of the media on Sunday. But on Monday — before her actual passing — he relayed that he had mistakenly announced it because of a “miscommunication” involving hospital staff and O’Brien.
“He was called to go because she was passing away, they thought, and so he went and saw her — that is how it happened,” Pingel said Monday. “The phone rang at 10 a.m. [Monday] morning, and it was the hospital saying that, yes, she was still alive and in the ICU, and she had not passed away."
Pingel added that O’Brien — Roberts’s partner of 18 years who had been “very distraught” — was the one who originally informed the publicist of her supposed death. The Associated Press even wrote an obituary on her passing.
Roberts, the daughter of a fountain-pen salesman, was born Victoria Leigh Blum in the Bronx on October 15, 1955. She modeled and landed minor stage roles in New York before making it to Hollywood in the late 1970s. She replaced Shelley Hack in the final season of the Charlie’s Angels television series and went on to appear in several fantasy adventure films.
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