Joanna Pettet

Joanna Jane Salmon was born on 16 November 1942 in Chelsea, London, the daughter of Cecily (nee Tremaine) and Harold Nigel Egerton Salmon, known as Sammy, who had married in Chelsea in 1940. Her father was an RAF pilot who was court-martialled in 1941 for siphoning service petrol for his car, and who then flew as a civilian captain with RAF Transport Command, ferrying aircraft from North American factories across the Atlantic. She met him only once, when she was a few months old. On 6 December 1943 the B-25 Mitchell bomber he was piloting from Goose Bay, Newfoundland, to Reykjavik, Iceland, disappeared without trace. He was 34 and is commemorated on the Ottawa Memorial. "How I wish I had known him," she later wrote.

During German air raids, Joanna and her cousin David Dalton were carried in baskets into the London Underground for protection. After the war her mother emigrated to Canada. On a train from Montreal to Vancouver, a fellow passenger, Charles Pettet, offered the little girl a stick of gum, and she introduced him to her mother. The couple married, the family settled in Montreal, and Joanna was adopted by her stepfather and took the surname Pettet.

In Montreal Pettet attended Trafalgar School for Girls, Miss Edgar's and Miss Cramp's School and Westmount High School. In 1960 she appeared at McGill University in the musical Got It Made, co-written by her boyfriend Allan Shiach, who later wrote films and television as Allan Scott. She added her 60 dollar fee to money her mother had saved and moved to New York as a teenager, where she studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and later at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, eventually earning a scholarship. "A 16-year-old girl in Manhattan, well, she either swims or sinks," she told Parade in 1966. "I learned to swim."

Pettet made her Broadway debut aged 19 as a replacement in the comedy Take Her, She's Mine (1961 to 1962), and the columnist Walter Winchell called her a "breathtaking teenage darling from Canada." In 1963 she took over the role of Roxane in Enid Bagnold's The Chinese Prime Minister at Toronto's Royal Alexandra Theatre and went with it to New York, where a New York Times critic called her "enigmatic, beautiful and terribly inconstant." Her third Broadway play, Jean Kerr's Poor Richard at the Helen Hayes Theatre (1964 to 1965), cast her as the secretary to an English poet played by Alan Bates, with Gene Hackman also in the company. It won her a Theatre World Award, and The New Yorker's John McCarten described her as "the most radiant ingenue I've seen around in a long time."

After television guest roles beginning with Route 66 in 1964, Pettet made her film debut in Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Mary McCarthy's The Group (1966) as Kay Strong, the outsider among eight Vassar graduates, who marries an abusive playwright played by Larry Hagman. Director Bruce LaBruce later called it "her most indelible performance."

Three films followed in 1967. In The Night of the Generals, shot in Europe with Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif and Tom Courtenay, she played the daughter of a German general. In the chaotic Bond spoof Casino Royale she played Mata Bond, the daughter of Mata Hari and Sir James Bond (David Niven). The film was mauled by critics but was a box-office hit. In Peter Yates's Robbery, inspired by the Great Train Robbery, she was the lone female lead opposite Stanley Baker. She then played a doctor's daughter nursing an outlaw played by Terence Stamp in the western Blue (1968) and a crusading feminist in Denis Norden's Victorian comedy The Best House in London (1969). Later features included the cult horror films Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) and The Evil (1978), Double Exposure (1982) and Sweet Country (1987).

From the early 1970s Pettet worked mainly in American television. She appeared four times on Rod Serling's Night Gallery, more than any other actress, including The House, The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and an episode with her then husband Alex Cord. She starred in more than a dozen TV movies, among them The Weekend Nun (1972), Footsteps (1972), Pioneer Woman (1973), A Cry in the Wilderness (1974), The Desperate Miles (1975), Sex and the Married Woman (1977), Cry of the Innocent (1980) and The Return of Frank Cannon (1980), and in the NBC miniseries Captains and the Kings (1976).

She guest-starred on Mannix, Banacek, McCloud, Harry O, Police Woman, Charlie's Angels, Murder, She Wrote and, in Britain, on Thriller and Tales of the Unexpected, and appeared three times each on The Love Boat and Fantasy Island. In 1983 she had a recurring role on Knots Landing as LAPD detective Janet Baines, and in 1984 she appeared as herself alongside Britt Ekland and Lana Wood in a James Bond tribute episode of The Fall Guy. "I'd like a series," she said of her hopes for a long-running role. Her final screen credit was the thriller Terror in Paradise (1990), which went straight to video, and she then retired from acting.

In the late 1960s Pettet had a year-long romance with Victor Lownes, who ran Playboy in London, and a relationship with Terence Stamp, her co-star in Blue. In 1968 she married the American actor Alex Cord, and her only child, Damien Zachary Cord, was born months later. She later said that Stamp was Damien's father. She and Cord divorced in 1989. Damien died of a heroin overdose on 7 July 1995, aged 26.

Pettet had a close friendship with Sharon Tate and lunched at Tate's home on 8 August 1969, hours before the Manson Family murders. "I lost it when Sharon was killed," she later said. "I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral." In 1980 she offered a spare room to John Paul DeJoria, then homeless and sleeping in his car on Mulholland Drive, before he co-founded John Paul Mitchell Systems. She remained close to her cousin David Dalton, who died in 2022.

She and Alan Bates had been friends since Poor Richard, and in 2002 and 2003 she cared for him in London during his final illness. He left her 95,000 pounds in his will. After retiring she settled in Arizona and later lived in Temecula, California. In August 2021, while climbing for a rock for her garden in the desert near Anza, California, she was pinned under a boulder for three hours and later needed shoulder and rotator cuff surgery.

In 1966 Pettet told Parade that her goal was to become a major screen star: "I just have to, because I'm terribly ambitious, terribly lucky and terribly driven." At the height of her Casino Royale fame she described herself as "not a sex bomb," and she was candid about her craft, joking that much of her dancing in the film was done by a double. She was equally frank in later life about her private life, including the paternity of her son and the end of her marriage.

Pettet is remembered for a handful of vivid late 1960s film roles, above all Kay in The Group and Mata Bond in Casino Royale, and for her shimmering, otherworldly performances on Night Gallery. Bruce LaBruce said of The House that "the soft-focus photography emphasizes her translucent beauty." Her link to Sharon Tate's final day gave her a lasting place in Hollywood history, recreated in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). The archivist Robert Nedelkoff observed that how she went from that 1966 ambition to leaving the business within a quarter century was a question for future film and television scholars.

Pettet won a Theatre World Award for 1964 to 1965 for her performance in Jean Kerr's Poor Richard on Broadway.

Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) depicts the lunch Pettet shared with Sharon Tate on 8 August 1969, with Rumer Willis playing Pettet and Margot Robbie playing Tate. Pettet was also featured in Playboy pictorials tied to Casino Royale in 1967 and Blue in 1968.

Joanna Pettet died at Temecula Valley Hospital in Temecula, California, on 7 July 2026, aged 83, exactly 31 years after the death of her son Damien. Her friend and former manager Pam DuBois announced the news on Facebook, writing: "We all loved Jo. But there was one person who loved her more. And yesterday on the 31st anniversary of his death. Damien Zach took his mother to heaven and there she will stay with him forever." No cause of death was made public. She had been predeceased by her former husband Alex Cord.