Andrea Evans, One Life to Live and Young and the Restless star, dies at 66

Andrea Evans, the veteran daytime TV star best known for playing troubled teenager Tina Lord on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, died Sunday at 66.

Casting director Don Carroll confirmed the news to EW and said the cause was cancer. Evans had previously revealed to the world that she had undergone treatment for breast cancer. She is survived by her husband, Steve Rodriguez, and their daughter, Kylie.

Born in Aurora, Ill., Evans appeared in beauty pageants and regional theater as a kid, and got her official start in show business as an extra in Brian De Palma's 1978 thriller The Fury. That same year, she was also an extra in the NBC miniseries The Awakening. She soon landed the role of Tina Lord on One Life to Live, and quickly rose to fame. Evans stayed with the series until 1981, and went on to play Patty Williams on The Young and the Restless.

Everett Collection Andrea Evans on 'The Bold and the Beautiful'

Evans returned to One Life to Live in 1985. The series reached new heights and she was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Ingenue, but she abruptly left the series again in 1987 after an encounter with a stalker in the lobby of the show's Manhattan studio. Recounting the incident to PEOPLE years later, Evans said that the fear "forever changed me. There's no way it could not."

After a hiatus, Evans returned to acting with two feature films, 1994's A Low Down Dirty Shame and 1995's Ice Cream Man. She also appeared on more soap operas, including The Bold and the Beautiful, Passions, The Bay, and the web series DeVanity. As a soap mainstay, Evans spoke highly of the genre throughout her career.

"It's a genre that is solid and good and it's present in a lot more of our entertainment than people want to admit," she said in a 2016 interview. "Star Trek is a soap in outer space! The soaps that are on now are so solid and doing so well, and I think it's great that they're moving so well into digital media. Soaps are here to stay."

Evans reprised her OLTL role once more in 2011, as the series wound down its run on network TV. The actress, who built legions of fans over the course of her career in daytime television, recently completed work on a forthcoming memoir, My One Life to Live.

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