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Actor Joanna Pettet, pictured in March, 1967, died in California on July 7, according to her friend and former manager Pam DuBois.Express/Getty Images
The lithe elegance and delicate beauty of the London-born, Montreal-reared actor Joanna Pettet lent her work an ethereal quality, whether as a skimpily clad spy in the sixties James Bond spoof Casino Royale or as a blithely vampiric model in an early seventies Night Gallery episode.
A connection to the Manson Family murders, an unexpected early retirement and a tragic accident she endured off-screen later in life only added to her mysterious aura.
The theatre, film and television actor, whose success never quite seemed to match her ambition, died at Temecula Valley Hospital in Temecula, Calif., on July 7, according to her friend and former manager Pam DuBois. She was 83. No cause of death was shared.
It had been 31 years to the day since her only child, Damien Cord, died at 26 of a heroin overdose in 1995. She was also predeceased by Airwolf actor Alex Cord, her husband from 1968 to 1989.
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The New York-trained actor’s film debut came in Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, about the lives of eight Vassar graduates. In a cast that featured Candice Bergen, among others, Ms. Pettet portrayed an Ivy League outsider who married an abusive playwright played by Larry Hagman.
“It is her most indelible performance,” Canadian film director Bruce LaBruce said.
In 1967, Ms. Pettet was brought into the chaotic production of Casino Royale to play Mata Bond, the fictional illegitimate daughter of James Bond and Mata Hari. Though Ms. Pettet was initially reluctant to take on the role because of the belly dancing and derring-do required, she came to appreciate her performance.
“When I saw the film, I couldn’t believe how wonderful I was,” Ms. Pettet said years later. “Of course, it wasn’t me, it was my double,” she added, referring to the stunt woman who handled the more physical chores. “She did a lot of the dancing, too.”
Ms. Pettet then moved on to a Western, Blue, directed by Canadian Silvio Narizzano and starring Terrance Stamp, with whom she enjoyed a brief off-screen relationship. The film was panned by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times as “painfully inept.”
The actor received better exposure after Playboy published a pictorial of her tied to the 1968 movie. A year earlier, she was part of a Casino Royale spread in the same magazine. At the time, she described herself demurely as “not as sex bomb.”
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Ms. Pettet was friends with fellow actor Sharon Tate, who on an August night in 1969 was one of five people murdered by members of the Manson Family in the home she shared in Benedict Canyon with director Roman Polanski, who was in Europe at the time.
Hours before the killings, Ms. Pettet had lunch with Ms. Tate at the residence. “I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she told the authors of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.”
Ms. Pettet had transitioned from film to television by 1972 when she appeared for the fourth time in Rod Serling’s macabre NBC television series Night Gallery. She played a model who mesmerized her photographer in the episode The Girl with the Hungry Eyes, a spooky satire on advertising.
“You’re the lure, the bait,” James Farentino’s character accused her. “We lust for you, and for what those eyes hold out.”
Ms. Pettet settled into a career as a regular guest star on U.S. network television in the 1970s and 80s. She used her own wardrobe of gossamer, flowing fabrics to create a billowing new image for herself.
The look was on full display in another Night Gallery episode, The House, directed by John Astin of The Addams Family fame. The actor played a dream-happy woman just released from a sanitarium.
“For me, Joanna Pettet is most perfectly incarnated in that episode,” Mr. LaBruce said. “The soft-focus photography emphasizes her translucent beauty. She shimmers and gleams in the famous late-afternoon California sunlight that can sometimes have a sinister quality of unreality and madness.”
Channel-flipping audiences in the 1970s and 80s would have come across the actor in Mannix, Banacek, McCloud, Harry O, Police Woman, The Love Boat, Charlie’s Angels, Fantasy Island, Knight Rider and Murder, She Wrote – as well as, in Canada, a remake of The Littlest Hobo. She played a detective for one season of the primetime soap opera Knots Landing.
When the R-rated thriller Terror in Paradise went straight to video in 1991, Ms. Pettet went straight to retirement.
In a 1966 interview carried in the widely circulated newspaper magazine Parade, the then-23-year-old had said her goal was to be a major screen star: “I just have to, because I’m terribly ambitious, terribly lucky and terribly driven.”
Whether her luck ran out or her film choices sabotaged her momentum, the failure of Ms. Pettet to reach the next level is a source of bafflement to some.
“How she went from that level of aspiration in 1966,” said writer and archivist Robert Nedelkoff, “to completely withdrawing from the business within a quarter-century is the question for future film and television scholars to answer.”
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Joanna Jane Salmon was born on Nov. 16, 1942, the daughter of Cecily Salmon (née Tremaine) and pilot Harold Salmon. During German air raids, Joanna and cousin David Dalton, who grew up to be an early Rolling Stone writer, were taken in baskets to the London subway system for protection.
Her father, known as Sammy, was with the Royal Air Force until he was court-martialed during the Second World War in 1941 for siphoning off service petrol for his personal car.
In 1943, according to the Battle of Britain London Monument website, Mr. Salmon was a civilian pilot with a captain’s rank with the RAF Transport Command, which transported planes from U.S. aircraft factories to Britain. On Dec. 6, 1943, the Mitchell B-25 bomber he was piloting disappeared on the way from CFB Goose Bay in Newfoundland to Reykjavik, Iceland.
A search failed to reveal any trace of the aircraft or crew. Mr. Salmon was 34 and is commemorated on the Ottawa Memorial, also known as the Commonwealth Air Forces Memorial.
“How I wish I had known him,” Ms. Pettet later wrote of her father on Facebook. “I have been told that although he and I only spent one day together when he was on leave, and I was just a few months old, he loved me very much.”
As a child, Joanna immigrated to Canada with her mother and aunt. According to a story she told in Parade, on a train ride from Montreal to Vancouver a passenger – Charles Pettet, who worked in the paint and varnish industry – asked her if she wanted a stick of gum. She declined but gave her mother something to chew on when she introduced her to the “nice man.” The man and her mother married and the family settled in Montreal.
She attended Trafalgar School for Girls, the private Miss Edgars and Miss Cramps School, and Westmount High School. Her high-school boyfriend, she said, was Allan Shiach, a Scottish whiskey heir and student at McGill University. Under the pen name Allan Scott he went on to co-write eight feature films and co-create the hit 2020 Netflix chess drama, The Queen’s Gambit.
Lesser known was his early play Got It Made. Ms. Pettet used the $60 she earned performing in its production at McGill (and $1,000 her mother had saved from a widow’s pension) to study drama in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and Elia Kazan’s Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. She later earned a scholarship.
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“A 16-year-old girl in Manhattan, well, she either swims or sinks,” Ms. Pettet said in the 1966 Parade interview. “I learned to swim.”
When the 19-year-old ingénue landed a replacement part in the Broadway coming-of-age comedy Take Her, She’s Mine, syndicated newspaper columnist Walter Winchell described her as a “breathtaking teenage darling from Canada.”
In 1963, Ms. Pettet took over a part in Enid Bagnold’s comedy The Chinese Prime Minister at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre and went with it to New York’s Royale Theater. A New York Times critic judged the 21-year-old as “enigmatic, beautiful and terribly inconstant” in the role of Roxane.
She won a Theatre World Award in 1965 for her performance in the original Broadway production of Jean Kerr’s Poor Richard at the Helen Hayes Theatre with Alan Bates and Gene Hackman.
In 1967, she was cast opposite Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif as the daughter of a German officer suspected of killing prostitutes in The Night of The Generals, filmed in Europe. The same year, she was lone female lead in Peter Yates’s heist film Robbery.
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Actors Stanley Baker, left, Ms. Pettet, centre, and James Booth starred in Peter Yates’s 1967 heist film Robbery.Larry Ellis/Getty Images
A mild controversy occurred in 1968, when Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones was arrested for drugs in a London flat previously occupied by Ms. Pettet. Questioned later by a constable about marijuana found in a ball of wool, the actor said the wool may or may not have been hers but that she had no knowledge of any drugs. Mr. Jones was found guilty, but walked away with a small fine.
The woman who once needed a scholarship to study acting in New York demonstrated her compassion when she helped entrepreneur John Paul DeJoria when he was homeless in 1980.
“Joanna Pettet came by and knocked on my car window on Mulholland Drive, where I parked,” Mr. DeJoria told The Los Angeles Times. “She said, ‘I heard you were sleeping in your car. I have an extra room in my house you could have for a couple of months free of charge.’ That was really nice.”
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In 2002, Ms. Pettet flew to England to be with ailing actor Mr. Bates. She had adored him since the Broadway run of Poor Richard nearly 40 years earlier. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 2003, the actor left her £95,000.
The relaxation of her retirement was shattered on Aug. 22, 2021. She was in the desert of Anza, Calif., climbing to reach the perfect rock for her garden. When the ground gave way, a boulder fell atop her and pinned her right shoulder down for three hours before she was rescued.
Reconstructive surgery was not entirely successful in relieving her pain and restoring mobility to her dominant hand, according to Facebook posts at the time by her friend Ms. DuBois.
Ms. Pettet was very close to her cousin, Mr. Dalton, who came to Canada from London as a child at the same time she did. In 1971, he and David Felton interviewed Charles Manson for a feature that won Rolling Stone its first National Magazine Award. Mr. Dalton died in 2022.
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