Night Gallery Actress Joanna Pettet Dies at 83
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London-born actress Joanna Pettet, a familiar face in film, television, and theater, has died at the age of 83. Pettet built a career that spanned movies, Broadway, and television over three decades, and with four starring performances on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, she was the most visible actor on the series.
Although English by birth, her American accent betrayed no trace of her origins. This flexibility allowed her to easily play both sides of the Atlantic, and with the advent of the Beatles, America was having a love affair with all things English.
“We were very hot at the moment,” Pettet says. “It was Julie Christie and Terence Stamp, Jackie Bisset, and a few of us moved out here [to the United States]. In London, the press always used to be there for me when I got off the plane from New York. And then, only because the buzz started in England, in LA they started to take real note. Suddenly, the press was always there. There were a few of us who were willing to do TV, and they were thrilled to have us.”
Throughout the 1960s, Pettet’s work had been almost exclusively on the stage. At the age of seventeen, she made her Broadway debut in Take Her, She’s Mine in 1962, followed in 1964 by The Chinese Prime Minister with Margaret Leighton and Poor Richard with Gene Hackman and Alan Bates. Her feature film work included Sidney Lumet’s The Group in 1966, and, in 1967, Casino Royale, Robbery, and Night of the Generals. She took time off in 1968 to have a child, but by the 1970s was again looking for roles. Casting directors for Night Gallery beckoned.
“My agent came to me with a few things for television that I turned down, and then one day she said, ‘Shall I keep on trying? Because Night Gallery wants to do a thing, and it’s a great script.’ So, when I read that script I thought, ‘If I’m going to do TV, I like that image.’ It was just interesting enough and offbeat enough for me to make the switch [from features].” Having never worked before in television, Pettet adapted well to the change in acting technique necessary for the magnifying effects of the small screen. And in a deliberate career move, she found Night Gallery to be a perfect forum to cultivate a new image for herself—ethereal, mysterious, and dreamlike, clearly visible
in her first Night Gallery segment, “The House.”
The roles she chose were haunted, illusory women, eliciting desire, and sometimes fear, from the men caught by her allure. “I created that image,” says Pettet. “And because of Night Gallery I was able to play that ‘ethereal’ thing.” She accented her natural gifts—her exquisite facial features and her slim, reed-like body—with clothing designed to produce an airy, diaphanous quality. “All the clothes that I had were made in England by two rising, hip fashion designers: Holly Harp and Thea Porter from London. Thea Porter was very gypsyish, and I wore her things mostly in ‘Girl with the Hungry Eyes.’”
From the frequency of her appearances on the show, Pettet’s image must have attracted those in charge of Night Gallery. “That image I created was so important to me,” Pettet ruefully admits, “but I really didn’t know who I was. I got all these wonderful, dreamy parts, and I thought that they were ‘me.’ But in the end, I turned around and I said, ‘This is much too ethereal—I’m not at all that girl in Night Gallery.’ But for that period in my life, I had this image that I thought I could get across, and they bought it for a few years. I couldn’t play that part forever, though.”
A popular actress, Pettet’s face was all over the tube in the 1970s. But by her own admission, Night Gallery was her strongest work at this stage of her career, and her appearances figure strongly in any die-hard fan’s memories of the show. “Anybody who said to me, ‘I loved you in such-and-such,’ I’d look at them and I’d say, ‘I’ll bet you were, like, in the sixth grade, and when you were doing your homework, you used to watch Night Gallery. And they’d go, ‘Yeah.’ I loved doing the show. I felt like a regular.”
Over the years, she appeared in numerous other popular television series, including Route 66, The Doctors, Dr. Kildare, Mannix, Thriller, Police Woman, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Hotel, and Murder, She Wrote. Her final screen appearance came in the 1991 thriller Terror in Paradise, after which she retired from acting while still in her forties.
Pettet’s life was marked by profound personal tragedy. Her only child, Damien Zach, died on July 7, 1995, at the age of 26. Although actor Terence Stamp was rumored to be his biological father, Damien took the surname Cord after Pettet married American actor Alex Cord in 1968, just three and a half months before Damien’s birth. In later years, Pettet spoke publicly about the abuse she and her son allegedly endured during her marriage to Alex Cord, the Airwolf actor who died in 2021 at the age of 88.
That same year, Pettet suffered a serious accident while collecting rocks for her garden in a remote area of Anza, California. According to reports, the ground beneath her gave way, leaving her trapped beneath a boulder for nearly three hours. She underwent surgery to replace her shoulder and repair her rotator cuff, spending several years recovering from the devastating injuries.
She passed away on Tuesday, July 7, 2026, with the news confirmed by her close friend, actress Pam DuBois, in a heartfelt Facebook tribute. Sharing a photograph of Pettet at a grave site, DuBois wrote: “We all loved Jo—but there was one person who loved her more. And yesterday, on the thirty-first anniversary of his death, Damien Zach took his mother to heaven, and there she will stay with him forever. God bless you, Jo.”
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