Joanna Pettet, the actor best known for Casino Royale, has died aged 83. Her death closes the life of a British-born, Canadian-raised performer whose name stayed attached to a 1967 box-office smash and to the Hollywood history around Sharon Tate.
In Casino Royale, she played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond, and she once captured the role’s tone with a line that became part of her own story: “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?”
Casino Royale and Mata Bond
1967 was the year Casino Royale reached audiences with a production history that ran through five directors and drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the official 007 movies. The film still became a box-office smash, and Pettet’s place in it gave her the kind of screen identification that outlived the short burst of fame that followed her first few films.
David Niven played Sir James Bond in the film, giving the project a built-in contrast between spoof and franchise. Pettet later described the role as “campy,” which is probably the cleanest way to read a movie that was both chaotic behind the scenes and commercially effective in the end.
After Britain and feature films
After Casino Royale, she appeared in The Night of the Generals, Robbery, Blue, and The Best House in London. In Robbery, she played the wife of a crime boss played by Stanley Baker, and in Blue she played a GP’s daughter nursing a wounded outlaw acted by Terence Stamp.
After leaving Britain and feature films behind, she settled into guest roles on American television over the following two decades and retired from the screen before turning 50. That shortens the usual Hollywood arc, but it also keeps the record clear: she worked, then stepped away on her own schedule.
Sharon Tate and Once Upon
1969 linked Pettet to a different corner of film history, when she was one of the last people to see Sharon Tate alive before Tate was murdered by Manson family members. Quentin Tarantino later folded that drama into Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, with Rumer Willis playing Pettet and Margot Robbie playing Tate.
Pettet’s later years carried one more hard detail. She married Alex Cord in 1968, gave birth to Damien four months later, divorced in 1989, and later said Cord was not Damien’s father and called the marriage a “sham.” The cleanest reading of her career is that Casino Royale gave her the widest reach, while the Sharon Tate connection gave her story its longest afterlife.
That is why her death lands as more than a name in an obituary list: it removes one of the last direct links to a film that became a smash despite its unruly making, and to a film history that kept circling back to her long after she left the screen.
