Joanna Pettet, who has died aged 83, was a British-born, Canadian-raised actor who found fame in the 1960s after just a handful of films, including the James Bond spoof Casino Royale.
The 1967 film drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the “official” 007 movies and suffered from a production history that included five directors, but it became a box-office smash with expectant audiences. In it Pettet played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond (acted by David Niven, one of multiple 007s featured). She is seen performing an exotic dance in a Buddhist temple, where Niven signs her up as a spy. “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?” asks Pettet, who described the role as “campy”.
A-list stardom ultimately eluded her. Nevertheless, she remained part of Hollywood folklore through being one of the last people, in 1969, to see Sharon Tate alive before her actor friend’s shocking murder at the hands of Manson family members. Pettet and others lunched just a day earlier at the Los Angeles home that Tate shared with her husband, the film director Roman Polanski, who was away working in London.
This formed part of the drama in the director Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, anchoring the fictional elements of the late-1960s story to reality, with Pettet played by Rumer Willis and Tate by Margot Robbie.
Pettet’s career was at a crossroads by then, after first turning heads in three films all released in 1967. She brought humanity to the second world war murder mystery The Night of the Generals, a British-French production shot in Paris. As the daughter of a Nazi officer suspected of sadistically killing a sex worker, her character has a relationship with another officer, played by Tom Courtenay.
After Casino Royale, Pettet switched back to drama as the wife of a crime boss, played by Stanley Baker, who tries to dissuade him from carrying out a railway heist in Robbery, based on the real-life 1963 Great Train Robbery from a Glasgow-to-London Royal Mail train.
During this time, she had a year-long romance with Victor Lownes, who headed the Playboy empire in London, and planned to stay in Britain. However, the 1968 western Blue took her to the US, where she had started her career, to play a GP’s daughter nursing a wounded outlaw, acted by Terence Stamp.
Pettet had a relationship with Stamp before marrying the American actor Alex Cord in 1968. Four months later, she gave birth to a son, Damien. In later years, she said that Stamp was the father and called her marriage a “sham”. She and Cord divorced in 1989.
Blue was widely panned, as was her final British film, The Best House in London (1969), the writer Denis Norden’s parody of the Victorian sex industry, which featured Pettet as a feminist crusader rescuing “fallen women”.
Leaving Britain and feature films behind, over the following two decades Pettet settled into guest roles on American television until she retired from the screen before turning 50.
Born in Chelsea, London, she was the daughter of Cecily (nee Tremaine) and Harold Salmon, known as Sammy, who had been a wartime RAF pilot until being court-martialled for siphoning off service petrol for his car. He then became a civilian pilot with RAF Transport Command, taking planes from North American aircraft factories across the Atlantic.
She met her father on only one occasion, when she was a few months old and he was on leave, before in 1943 he went missing, presumed dead, in a bomber en route from Newfoundland, Canada, to Reykjavik, Iceland. Her mother then emigrated to Canada to live in Montreal, Quebec, later marrying Charles Pettet.
Joanna attended Westmount high school, then in 1960 appeared at McGill University in a musical titled Got It Made, co-written by her boyfriend, Allan Shiach, who under the name Allan Scott later scripted films such as Don’t Look Now and The Witches. She added her $60 earnings from performing in it to money from her mother’s savings to travel to New York at the age of 18 and study drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre.
Pettet acted in three Broadway plays, culminating in the Jean Kerr comedy Poor Richard (Helen Hayes theatre, 1964-65). Her performance as the secretary to an English poet in Greenwich Village, played by Alan Bates, won her a Theatre World award, and the New Yorker critic John McCarten described her as “the most radiant ingenue I’ve seen around in a long time”.
Later, Pettet revealed that she and Bates had had an eight-month affair, occasionally revived over the years, until she nursed him in London before his death from cancer in 2003. Bates left her £95,000 in his will.
She made her film debut in The Group (1966) as one of eight Ivy League college graduates setting out on life, with Larry Hagman playing her drunken playwright husband. Despite mixed reviews, the movie proved to be her breakthrough.
Later, on her return to the US after leaving Britain, Pettet constantly popped up in popular television series such as Mannix (1971), McCloud (1973), Police Woman (1975), The Love Boat (1978-82), Knight Rider (1984) and Murder, She Wrote (1987), as well as a dozen TV movies.
She also had a run in the soap opera Knots Landing in 1983 as a detective investigating the murder of Ciji Dunne (Lisa Hartman), but regretted that other long-running roles were not forthcoming. “I’d like a series,” she said. “I’d like to know that there is something I have to do every single day.”
After her last screen appearance, in the 1991 film Terror in Paradise, she settled in Arizona. Her son died of a drug overdose in 1995.
• Joanna Jane Pettet, actor, born 16 November 1942; died 7 July 2026
