Joanna Pettet, the London-born actress who played one of the eight Vassar graduates in Sidney Lumet’s The Group and a spy put to work by her father, David Niven’s James Bond, in Casino Royale, has died. She was 83.
Pettet died Tuesday at Temecula Valley Hospital in California, her friend and former manager Pam DuBois told The Hollywood Reporter. Her death came exactly 31 years after her son, Damien Cord, whom she had with actor Alex Cord, died at age 26 in 1995 of a heroin overdose.
Pettet also fell for Tom Courtenay’s German officer in Anatole Litvak’s The Night of the Generals (1967); portrayed the wife of Stanley Baker’s crook in Peter Yates’ crime caper Robbery (1967); and was the spirited love interest of Terence Stamp‘s bandit in Blue (1968).
She began her film career after acting in three Broadway comedies in the early 1960s.
On television, Pettet turned up on four episodes of Rod Serling’s NBC anthology series Night Gallery in the early 1970s and had a recurring role spanning the fourth and fifth seasons of CBS’ Knots Landing in ’83 as Janet Baines, a homicide detective investigating the murder of singer Ciji Dunne (Lisa Hartman).
