Everything about Joanna Pettet totally explained
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 Mine,
The Chinese Prime Minister and
Poor Richard, with the late 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
Candice 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 Group indicated that she'd 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 the
James Bond spoof
Casino Royale (1967), Peter Yates's
Robbery with Sir Stanley Baker (1967), the strange Western drama
Blue (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.
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 Kings (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 Brian 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 assassination of Marxist President
Salvador Allende, featuring
Jane 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'd lost her enthusiasm for acting and decided it was time to bow out gracefully from the entertainment industry.
The sudden death (of a heroin overdose) in 1995 of her only child, Damien Zachary Cord, at the age of 26 nearly destroyed Pettet. Her shock and grief over his death caused her 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 and visited Tate for several hours at her Benedict Canyon home on the afternoon of August 8, 1969 - the day Tate was 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 Girl 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 esteemed British 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.
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