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. She was 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.
Pettet also fell for Tom Courtenay’s German officer in Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967); portrayed the wife of Stanley Baker’s crook in Peter Yates’ crime caper Robbery (1967); and was the spirited love interest of Terence Stamp‘s bandit in Blue (1968).
She began her film career after acting in three Broadway comedies in the early 1960s.
On television, Pettet turned up on four episodes of Rod Serling’s NBC anthology series Night Gallery in the early 1970s and had a recurring role spanning the fourth and fifth seasons of CBS’ Knots Landing in ’83 as Janet Baines, a homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne (Lisa Hartman).
On Aug. 8, 1969, 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 is re-created in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Rumer Willis as Pettet as Margot Robbie at Tate.
In The Group (1966), adapted from Mary McCarthy’s novel, Pettet portrayed Kay Strong, who marries an alcoholic, abusive and philandering playwright (Larry Hagman) before meeting an untimely end.
The story of her character bookends the drama, which featured Candice Bergen, Joan Hackett, Elizabeth Hartman, Shirley Knight, Jessica Walter, Kathleen Widdoes and Mary-Robin Redd as her classmates.
The lithe Pettet then sparkled as Mata Bond, the product of a love affair between Niven’s 007 and the spy Mata Hari, in the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967). In one of the film’s most memorable set pieces, she performs a dance in a Buddhist-themed temple before connecting with her daddy.
Joanna Jane Salmon was born in London on Nov. 16, 1942. After her father, Harold, a British Royal Air Force pilot, was killed during World War II, her mother, Cecily, remarried and settled in Montreal.
Joanna took the surname of her stepfather and had $1,000 with her when she moved to New York at age 16. “I thought it would last me up to two years,” she said in a 1967 interview. “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.”
Pettet 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 and directed by George Abbott.
She was back on Broadway in 1964 in the comedies The Chinese Prime Minister and, opposite Alan Bates and Gene Hackman, Poor Richard, for which she received a Theatre World award for her efforts. In the latter, she served as a last-minute replacement for Knight, who quit shortly before the production was to open in New York.
Also in 1964, Pettet appeared on an episode of ABC’s Route 66 and began a stint as a nurse on the NBC daytime serial The Doctors. Two years later, she played a dancer whose life and career is threatened by a rare neuromuscular disease on NBC’s Dr. Kildare, starring Richard Chamberlain.
She posed in Playboy in 1968 to promote Blue.
In the 1970s, Pettet starred in lots of telefilms, in the horror films Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) and The Evil (1978) and on the NBC miniseries Captains and the Kings (1976).
She appeared as herself in a 1984 episode of ABC’s Lee Majors-starring The Fall Guy alongside fellow Bond actresses Britt Ekland and Lana Wood. (The trio are hired to appear in a movie that’s titled Always Say Always.)
Her final role came in the Roger Corman-produced Terror in Paradise (1990), after which she retired from acting.
She was romantically involved with Stamp and, when they were in Poor Richard, with Bates. Soon after she and Bates rekindled their relationship in 2002, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Upon his death in December 2003, he bequeathed her a reported £95,000 (that’s about $265,000 in today’s dollars).
“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,” she told The Daily Mail.
