Joanna Pettet, who rose to fame as one of the tight-knit Vassar grads in Sidney Lumet’s 1966 adaptation of novelist Mary McCarthy’s bestseller The Group, died Tuesday, July 7. She was 83.
Her death was announced on Facebook by friend and former manager Pam DuBois, who noted that Pettet died on the anniversary of the death of her son (with actor and former husband Alex Cord) Damien Zachary Cord. “We all loved Jo,” DuBois wrote. “But there was one person who loved her more. And yesterday on the 31st anniversary of his death. Damien Zach took his mother to heaven and there she will stay with him forever.”
Pettet’s cause of death was not disclosed.
In The Group, Pettet played Kay, the most down-to-earth of the otherwise wealthy friend clique who marries an abusive man. The controversial film touched on a number of then-delicate subjects, including lesbianism in the form of main character Lakey, played by Candice Bergen. Other cast members included Jessica Walter, Joan Hackett, Shirley Knight, Elizabeth Hartman, Kathleen Widdoes and Mary-Robin Redd.
The following year, Pettet starred as Mata Bond in Casino Royale, the poorly received 1967 James Bond parody that starred Peter Sellers, David Niven, Woody Allen and William Holden, among others. Pettet played the love child of James Bond and spy Mata Hari.
Despite her early film entries, which also included, among others, Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals in 1967, Pettet would find a more prolific schedule in TV, with appearances in ’60s and ’70s series such as Route 77, The Doctors, The Fugitive, Dr. Kildare, Mannix, Banacek, Medical Center, Police Story, Police Woman and four episodes of the Rod Serling thriller anthology Night Gallery from 1970-72. In the ’80s, she appeared in Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Knight Rider and, in a recurring role,Knots Landing.
Just before retiring from acting, Pettet appeared in the 1990 film Terror in Paradise, produced by low-budget horror maestro Roger Corman.
Born Joanna Jane Salmon on November 16, 1942, in London, Pettet moved to New York at age 16 to study acting at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse and Lincoln Center. She landed her first of three Broadway roles in the 1961 comedy Take Her, She’s Mine, directed by George Abbott and starring Art Carney and Elizabeth Ashley.
Pettet’s subsequent Broadway credits were 1964’s The Chinese Prime Minister and, also that year, playwright Jean Kerr’s Poor Richard starring Alan Bates and Gene Hackman.
Pettet was married to actor Cord from 1968 to 1989, and, at other times, was romantically linked to actors Terrence Stamp and Alan Bates, whom she first dated when they appeared together on Broadway in Poor Richard. They rekindled their relationship 38 years later in 2002, and when Bates died of pancreatic cancer the following year he left her a sum of £95,000.
If Pettet’s high-profile relationships were headline-making, so too was her tangential proximity to the 1969 murder of Sharon Tate by the Charles Manson family. On the afternoon of August 8 that year, Pettet and actor Barbara Lewis visited their friend Tate for lunch; Tate and four others were murdered at the home later that night. The poolside afternoon visit was recreated in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Rumer Willis portraying Pettet.
Information on survivors was not immediately available. Her cousin, rock music author and Rolling Stone writer David Dalton, with whom she grew up in London surviving World War II air raids, died in 2022.
