Casino Royale star dies at 83
Joanna Pettet, the British-born, Canadian-raised actor who found fame in the 1960s with the James Bond spoof Casino Royale, has died aged 83. The 1967 film drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the official 007 movies and had a troubled production history involving five directors, but it became a box-office smash. Pettet played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond, played by David Niven. She performed an exotic dance in a Buddhist temple and was signed up as a spy, with the line: “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?” She described the role as “campy”.
Connection to Sharon Tate
Pettet remained part of Hollywood folklore as one of the last people to see Sharon Tate alive before her murder by Manson family members in 1969. She and others had lunch a day earlier at the Los Angeles home Tate shared with her husband, film director Roman Polanski. This event was dramatised in Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with Pettet played by Rumer Willis and Tate by Margot Robbie.
Early career and films
Pettet’s career took off in 1967 with three films. In The Night of the Generals, a second world war murder mystery shot in Paris, she played the daughter of a Nazi officer. After Casino Royale, she starred in Robbery as the wife of a crime boss, played by Stanley Baker, trying to stop a railway heist based on the 1963 Great Train Robbery. She had a year-long romance with Victor Lownes, head of the Playboy empire in London, and planned to stay in Britain, but the 1968 western Blue took her to the US. She played a GP’s daughter nursing a wounded outlaw, acted by Terence Stamp. Pettet had a relationship with Stamp before marrying American actor Alex Cord in 1968. Four months later, she gave birth to a son, Damien. She later said 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), a parody of the Victorian sex industry in which she played a feminist crusader.
Television career and later life
Leaving feature films behind, Pettet settled into guest roles on American television over the next two decades, appearing in 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 a murder. She regretted not landing a long-running role, saying: “I’d like a series. 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.
Early life and training
Born in Chelsea, London, she was the daughter of Cecily and Harold Salmon, known as Sammy, a wartime RAF pilot who was court-martialled for siphoning petrol for his car and later became a civilian pilot. She met her father only once, when she was a few months old, before he went missing, presumed dead, in a bomber in 1943. Her mother emigrated to Canada, settling in Montreal, and later married Charles Pettet. Joanna attended Westmount high school, then appeared at McGill University in a musical titled Got It Made in 1960. She used her $60 earnings from that and her mother’s savings to travel to New York at 18 to study drama at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. She acted in three Broadway plays, winning a Theatre World award for her performance in the Jean Kerr comedy Poor Richard (1964-65). The New Yorker critic John McCarten described her as “the most radiant ingenue I’ve seen around in a long time”. She later revealed an eight-month affair with co-star Alan Bates, occasionally revived over the years, and she nursed him before his death from cancer in 2003. Bates left her £95,000 in his will.
Film debut and legacy
Pettet made her film debut in The Group (1966) as one of eight Ivy League college graduates, with Larry Hagman playing her drunk playwright husband. Despite mixed reviews, it was her breakthrough. Joanna Jane Pettet was born on 16 November 1942 and died on 7 July 2026.
