Joanna Pettet, the London-born actress who played one of the eight Vassar graduates in Sidney Lumet’s The Group and a spy put to work by her father, David Niven’s James Bond, in Casino Royale, has died at the age of 83.
Pettet died Tuesday at Temecula Valley Hospital in California, her friend and former manager Pam DuBois told The Hollywood Reporter.
Her death came exactly 31 years after her son, Damien Cord, whom she had with actor Alex Cord, died at age 26 in 1995 of a heroin overdose.
Born Joanna Jane Salmon in London on November 16, 1942, she lost her father, Harold, a British Royal Air Force pilot, during World War II.
Her mother, Cecily, later remarried and settled in Montreal. Pettet moved to New York at age 16 with just $1,000 to her name, later recalling in a 1967 interview:
“I thought it would last me up to two years. I’d never really fended for myself before and didn’t realize how fast money could go. The whole nest egg was gone in three months.”
She studied acting at Neighborhood Playhouse and made her Broadway debut in the 1961-62 Hal Prince-produced comedy Take Her, She’s Mine, starring Art Carney and Elizabeth Ashley.
She returned to Broadway in 1964 in The Chinese Prime Minister and Poor Richard, opposite Alan Bates and Gene Hackman, for which she received a Theatre World award.
In the latter production, she served as a last-minute replacement for Shirley Knight, who quit shortly before the show was to open in New York.
In The Group (1966), adapted from Mary McCarthy’s novel, Pettet portrayed Kay Strong, a woman who marries an alcoholic, abusive and philandering playwright played by Larry Hagman before meeting an untimely end.
The film featured Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight, Jessica Walter, Kathleen Widdoes and Mary-Robin Redd as her classmates.
She then sparkled as Mata Bond in the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), playing the product of a love affair between Niven’s 007 and the spy Mata Hari.
She also appeared in Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967), Peter Yates’ crime caper Robbery (1967) and Blue (1968) alongside Terence Stamp, with whom she was romantically involved.
On television, Pettet appeared on four episodes of Rod Serling’s NBC anthology series Night Gallery in the early 1970s and had a recurring role across the fourth and fifth seasons of CBS’ Knots Landing in 1983, playing Janet Baines, a homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne played by Lisa Hartman.
One of the most remarkable footnotes of her life came on August 8, 1969, when she and fellow actress Barbara Lewis shared a poolside lunch at the Topanga Canyon home of actress Sharon Tate, hours before Tate and four others were murdered there by devotees of Charles Manson.
Her visit that day was later re-created in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Rumer Willis portraying Pettet alongside Margot Robbie as Tate.
In the 1970s, Pettet starred in several telefilms, horror films including Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) and The Evil (1978), and the NBC miniseries Captains and the Kings (1976). She posed in Playboy in 1968 to promote Blue and appeared as herself in a 1984 episode of ABC’s The Fall Guy alongside fellow Bond actresses Britt Ekland and Lana Wood.
Her final role came in the Roger Corman-produced Terror in Paradise (1990), after which she retired from acting entirely.
Pettet was also romantically involved with Alan Bates, with whom she rekindled her relationship in 2002 shortly before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Upon his death in December 2003, he bequeathed her a reported £95,000.
She told The Daily Mail:
“It was a very touching gesture because he had done everything while he was in hospital to make sure I would be looked after following his death.”
