RIP Andrea Evans

 

Andrea Evans, ‘One Life to Live’ and ‘Passions’ Star, Dies at 66

"Daytime's Diva of Dirt" famously portrayed Tina Lord on the ABC soap but had to quit when she was threatened by a stalker.

The Hollywood Reporter

By Mike Barnes

July 10, 2023

 

Andrea Evans, the popular soap opera star known for her turns as Tina Lord on ABC’s One Life to Live and Rebecca Hotchkiss on NBC/DirecTV’s Passions, has died. She was 66.

Evans died Sunday at her home in Pasadena after a battle with breast cancer, casting director Don Carroll told The Hollywood Reporter.

Evans came to fame by playing Tina — People magazine nicknamed her “Daytime’s Diva of Dirt” — on One Life to Live from 1979-81 and from 1985-90. However, she had to abruptly quit the soap after a stalker accosted her in the lobby of the show’s Manhattan studio in 1987 and later sent her death threats, some of them written in blood.

The fear “forever changed me. There’s no way it could not,” she told People in 2008.

Evans returned to the world of daytime as Tawny Moore on CBS’ The Bold and the Beautiful in 1999-2000, then spent the next eight years as Rebecca on Passions through its 2008 conclusion.

She followed with two other brief stints as Tina on One Life to Live in 2008 and 2011 — when her character remarried John Loprieno’s Cord Roberts — and came back as Tawney, too, for a 2010 episode of The Bold and the Beautiful.

On CBS’ The Young and the Restless, she played Patty Williams from 1983-84 and Tawny for an installment in 2010.

At the Daytime Emmys, Evans was nominated for outstanding ingenue in a drama series in 1988 for One Life to Live and outstanding performer in a “new approaches” drama series in 2015 for playing Vivian Price on DeVanity, an internet series.

Her last acting credit came on the Prime Video series The Bay; she was on that show from 2017-2020.

Born on June 18, 1957, in Aurora, Illinois, Evans attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While still in college, she was hired as an extra on Brian De Palma film The Fury (1978).

She later appeared in such features as A Low Down Dirty Shame (1994), Ice Cream Man (1995) and Hit List (2012) and on game shows including The $10,000 Pyramid and Hollywood Squares.

Evans worked for the City of Hope and various animal rescue organizations and recently completed a memoir, My One Life to Live, Carroll said.

Survivors include her husband, Steve, and their daughter, Kylie.

EVANS, Andrea (Andrea Lynn Evans)

Born: 6/18/1957, Aurora, Illinois, U.S.A.

Died: 7/9/2023, Pasadena, California, US.A.

 

Andrea Evans’s western – actress:

The Awakening Land (TV) - 1978 (Fay Morrison Wheeler)