Award-winning British actor Joan Plowright, who with her late husband Laurence Olivier did much to revitalize the UK’s theatrical scene in the decades after World War II, has died. She was 95.
In a statement Friday, her family said Plowright died the previous day at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in southern England, surrounded by her loved ones.
“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire,” the family said. “We are so proud of all Joan did and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive human being.”
Part of an astonishing generation of British actors, including Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith, Plowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globes and nominations for an Oscar and an Emmy. She was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright racked up dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” She stunned in Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs,” and George Bernard Shaw’s totemic two female roles “Major Barbara” and “Saint Joan.”
“I’ve been very privileged to have such a life,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview with The Actor’s Work. “I mean it’s magic and I still feel, when a curtain goes up or the lights come on if there’s no curtain, the magic of a beginning of what is going to unfold in front of me.”
The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident with the news that theaters across the West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. on Tuesday in her honor.
Born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur drama group and Plowright was involved in the theater from age 3. She was soon spending school vacations at summer sessions of university drama schools. After high school, she studied at the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, then won a two-year scholarship to the drama school at the Old Vic Theatre in London.
Following her London stage debut in 1954, Plowright became a member of the Royal Court Theatre in 1956 and gained recognition in dramas written by the so-called Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne, who were giving British theater a thorough airing-out. The new, rough-hewn, working-class actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins were her peers.
Plowright made her feature film debut with an uncredited turn in American director John Huston’s epic adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” in 1956, starring Gregory Peck as the obsessed Captain Ahab.
A year later, she co-starred with her future husband Olivier in the original London production of Osborne’s “The Entertainer.” She played Olivier’s daughter in the work and the two reunited for the 1960 film adaptation.
By then, Plowright’s marriage to British actor Roger Cage had ended, as had Olivier’s 20-year union with Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier were married in Connecticut in 1961, while both were starring on Broadway, he in “Becket” and she in “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony.
One love letter Olivier sent summed up his love: “I sometimes feel such a peacefulness come over me when I think of you, or write to you — a gentle tenderness and serenity. A feeling devoid of all violence, passion or shattering longing… it makes me go out into the street with a smile on my face and in my heart for everybody.”
Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. After that, Plowright enjoyed a career resurgence at the age of 60, satisfying both upmarket tastes and more commercial fare.
She was in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” in 1996 and the Merchant-Ivory production of “Surviving Picasso,” as well as starring as the stalwart nanny in Disney’s live-action remake of “101 Dalmatians” in 1996 with Glenn Close.
She starred opposite Walter Matthau in the big screen adaptation of the classic comic strip “Dennis the Menace,” and made a brief appearance in the Arnold Schwarzenegger self-referencing satire “Last Action Hero” in 1993.
Plowright became one of only a handful of actors to win two Golden Globes in the same year, in 1993, when she won the supporting actress TV award for “Stalin” and the supporting actress movie award for “Enchanted April.” For the latter, which told the story of a group of Britons finding their lives transformed on a vacation to Italy, she received her sole nomination for an Academy Award.
Not all her works were career roses, as with the disastrous “The Scarlet Letter” starring Demi Moore and a pilot that went nowhere for a TV series based on “Driving Miss Daisy.” An appearance alongside Chevy Chase in the 2011 holiday family comedy “Goose on the Loose” didn’t rouse critics.
A prominent role in later life was keeper of the Olivier flame — bestowing awards, defending her husband in the press and curating his letters.
“That is my choice because I was privileged to live with him,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2003. “When someone who has had such fame and idolatry and worship goes, then there’s bound to be a backlash which comes the other way and you get a bit sick of that. Mine was really trying to put things straight.”
Plowright is survived by her three children — Tamsin, Richard and Julie-Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.
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