JOANNA PETTET

(16 November 1942 – 7 July 2026)

The Canadian-English actress Joanna Pettet, who has died at the age of 83, was born in London, England, to a British RAF pilot killed in action in World War II. After the war, Joanna’s mother remarried and moved to Montreal where her daughter adopted her stepfather’s surname. Joanna then became a student of Sanford Meisner at the Neighbourhood Playhouse and also studied at the Lincoln Center in New York. She made her Broadway debut at the age of 19 in Take Her, She’s Mine, understudying Elizabeth Ashley in a play about Nora Ephron. From 1964 she regularly appeared on television but her big break arrived with Sidney Lumet’s The Group, an ensemble drama following the lives of eight female university graduates during the 1930s. The cast also included Candice Bergen, Shirley Knight, Elizabeth Hartman, Joan Hackett, Jessica Walter and Kathleen Widdoes.

Joanna Pettet next appeared in Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals with Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif and Tom Courtenay, played James Bond’s love child Mata Bond in the 007 spoof Casino Royale with Peter Sellers, David Nven and Woody Allen, was in Peter Yates’s Robbery with Stanley Baker (a fictionalised version of the Great Train Robbery), and Blue, a Western with Terence Stamp. She also did The Best House in London, a Victorian style comedy with David Hemmings and George Sanders. After these fairly high-profile pictures, Pettet was in a couple of horror movies and then found more work on television. She retired from acting in 1990 when she was still in her 40s.

Joanna Pettet was married to the actor Alex Cord from 1969 to 1989 and they had one child, Damien Zach who, aged 26, died of a heroin overdose. In 1969 she was lunching with a very pregnant Sharon Tate just hours before the latter was murdered by the Manson family and was played in Quentin Tarantino’s fictionalised account of the massacre, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, by Rumer Willis, daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis. In 2003, Pettet found herself the recipient of £95k (worth about £174k today), when Alan Bates died and bequeathed her the sum in his will, to express his gratitude to the actress when she looked after him during his final months struggling with pancreatic cancer. Then, in August of 2021, she found herself trapped under a boulder in the desert near Anza, California, for which she eventually had to have surgery to replace her shoulder and rotator cuff. She died on the 31st anniversary of her son’s death.

MICHAEL DARVELL