Joanna Pettet, an actor who achieved prominence in the 1960s, died this month at age 83. Born in London, she relocated to Canada as a young child after her father, an RAF pilot, went missing in 1943. She later moved to New York to study drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and began her stage career, performing in three Broadway productions. Her most notable stage role came in the 1964-65 production of Poor Richard at the Helen Hayes Theatre, where she played a secretary and earned a Theatre World award.
Pettet’s film career took off with three releases in 1967. She appeared in The Group the previous year, playing one of eight Ivy League graduates navigating adulthood. Her 1967 roles included a part in The Night of the Generals, a World War II murder mystery, and Mata Bond in Casino Royale, a Bond parody that achieved box-office success despite mixed critical reception. That same year, she appeared in Robbery, playing the wife of a crime boss involved in a heist based on the real-life 1963 Great Train Robbery.
However, major stardom eluded Pettet. She continued acting through the 1960s and into the 1980s, primarily in guest appearances on television series including Mannix, McCloud, Police Woman, The Love Boat, and Murder, She Wrote, along with numerous television movies. She also had a role in the soap opera Knots Landing in 1983. After her last screen appearance in the 1991 film Terror in Paradise, she withdrew from the entertainment industry and settled in Arizona.
Pettet remained part of Hollywood history through her connection to actress Sharon Tate, whom she saw alive shortly before Tate’s murder by Manson family members in 1969. This encounter was later dramatized in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. In her personal life, Pettet married actor Alex Cord in 1968 and divorced him in 1989. She had a son, Damien, who died of a drug overdose in 1995.
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