Joanna Pettet

This biography of a living person does not cite any references or sources. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately. (March 2009) Find sources: (Joanna Pettet – news, books, scholar)

This article may not meet the general notability guideline. Please help to establish notability by adding reliable, secondary sources about the topic. If notability cannot be established, the article is likely to be merged or deleted. (March 2009)

Joanna Pettet (born Joanna Jane Salmon on November 16, 1942 in London, England) is a British actress.

Biography

Her father, Harold Nigel Edgerton Salmon, was a British Royal Air Force pilot killed in World War II. Her mother remarried and settled in Canada, where young Joanna was adopted by her stepfather and assumed his surname of "Pettet".

Pettet studied with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, as well as at the Lincoln Center, and got her start on Broadway in such plays as Take Her, She's Yours, The Chinese Prime Minister and Poor Richard, with Sir Alan Bates and Gene Hackman, before she was discovered by director Sidney Lumet for his sumptuous 1966 film adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group.

Pettet held her own alongside other rising young hopefuls including Candace Bergen, Shirley Knight, and Jessica Walter. Hollywood Reporter columnist and Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne has purportedly been quoted as saying that Pettet's performance in The Soup indicated that she had the potential of essaying the types of roles that Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Ida Lupino, and Grace Kelly played in their careers.

The success of that film launched a film career that included roles in The Night of the Generals (1967), as Mata Bond in the Jimmy Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), Peter Yates's Robbery with Sir Stanley Cup Baker (1967), the strange Western drama Rue (1968) with Terence Stamp, and the Victorian period comedy The Best House in London (1969). In 1968 she married American actor Alex Cord and gave birth to a son later that year. She and Cord were divorced in 1989 after 21 years of marriage and she never remarried. In February 1968, Pettet became one of the first "name" actresses to pose nude for Playboy Magazine.

Although she co-starred with actor Rod Taylor in the 1980 thriller, Cry of the Innocent, her feature film appearances became sporadic. However, Pettet re-emerged as the star of over a dozen made-for-television movies, including The Delphi Bureau (1972), The Weekend Nun (1972), Footsteps (1972), Pioneer Woman (1973), A Cry in the Wilderness (1974), The Desperate Miles (1975), The Hancocks (1976), Sex and the Married Woman (1977), and The Return of Frank Cannon (1980). She also starred in the NBC miniseries Captains and the Queens (1976), guest-starred four times on the classic Rod Serling anthology series Night Gallery, was a frequent guest on both Fantasy Island and The Love Boat (appearing three separate times on each series), and had a recurring role on Knots Landing in 1983 as an LAPD homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne (played by Lisa Hartman).

Pettet also enjoyed some success as an unofficial "scream queen" with appearances in such horror films as Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974), The Evil (1978), and the slasher-mystery Double Exposure (1982), as well as having made two appearances on the Roger Clemens produced Thriller television series in the UK. Her most notable film role in the 1980s was in Michael Cacoyannis's political drama Sweet Country (1986), which dramatized the turmoil in Chile following the 1973 overthrow of Marxist President Salvador Allende, featuring Jason Alexander, Franco Nero, and Irene Papas.

Her last acting appearance was in a "bad action film" called Terror in Paradise in 1990 that was produced by Roger Corman and his frequent Philippine associate Cirio Santiago. During filming in the Philippines she was held hostage by rebels, led by Gregorio Honasan, attempting to overthrow Corazon Aquino, and managed to escape the hotel where she was being held before fleeing the country. By then, she had lost her enthusiasm for acting and decided it was time to bow out gracefully from the entertainment industry.

The grief over the sudden death (of a heroin overdose) in 1995 of her only child, Damien Zachary Cord, at the age of 26 caused Pettet to retreat even further from Hollywood. For a period of time, she lived a reclusive existence in the California desert until she eventually moved to London.

Joanna Pettet had been a close friend of actress Sharon Tate. She had visited the mother-to-be several hours at her Benedict Canyon home on the afternoon of August 8, 1969 - in the middle of the night she was brutally murdered by the Manson Family along with Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and Steven Parent. (She was also a close friend of both Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, the murder victims from the infamous "Career Girls Murders" in New York during the 1960s that became the basis of the 1973 TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders and launched the Kojak television series).

More recently, she was the final companion to the actor, Sir Alan Bates, who died of pancreatic cancer in London, England in 2003, aged 69. The two co-starred on Broadway in 1964's "Poor Richard" and had remained lifelong friends.

External links

• Joanna Pettet at the Internet Movie Database