Joanna Pettet (born Joanna Jane Salmon; 16 November 1942 in London) is a British actress, retired since 1990.

Biography

Her parents, Harold Nigel Edgerton Salmon, a British Royal Air Force pilot killed in World War II, and mother, Cecily J. Tremaine, were married in London in 1940. After the war, her widowed mother remarried and settled in Canada, where young Joanna was adopted by her stepfather and assumed his surname of "Pettet".

She 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 Alan Bates and Gene Hackman, before she was discovered by director Sidney Lumet for his 1966 film adaptation of Mary McCarthy's novel, The Group. The success of that film launched a film career that included roles in The Night of the Generals (1967), as Mata Bond in the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), Peter Yates's Robbery (1967) with Stanley Baker, Blue (1968) with Terence Stamp and the Victorian period comedy, The Best House in London (1969).

In 1968 she married the 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. She has not remarried.

In 1969, Pettet had lunch at the home of Sharon Tate on the afternoon before Tate's murder in the home that evening.

In the 1970s her feature film appearances became sporadic and included roles in the cult horror films Welcome to Arrow Beach (1974) and The Evil (1978). However, Pettet re-emerged as the star of over a dozen made-for-television movies, including 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), Cry of the Innocent (1980) with Rod Taylor, and The Return of Frank Cannon (1980).

She starred in the NBC miniseries Captains and the Kings (1976), guest-starred four times on the classic Rod Serling anthology series Night Gallery, starred in the episode "You're Not Alone" from the 1977 NBC anthology series Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected (known in the United Kingdom as Twist in the Tale), was a frequent guest on both Fantasy Island and The Love Boat (appearing three times on each series), and had a recurring role on Knots Landing in 1983 as Janet Baines, an LAPD homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne (played by Lisa Hartman).

Pettet also made appearances on the TV series Banacek, McCloud, Mannix, Police Woman and Murder, She Wrote.