LONDON — Award-winning British actress Joan Plowright, who with her late husband Laurence Olivier did much to revitalize the British theater scene in the decades after World War II, has died. She was 95 years old.
In a statement Friday, her family said Plowright died the day before at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in the south of England, surrounded by her loved ones.
“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career in theater, film and television for seven decades until blindness caused her to retire,” the family said. “We are very proud of everything 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 has 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, from Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.” She amazed in “The Chairs” by Eugene Ionesco and in George Bernard Shaw’s two totemic female roles “Major Barbara” and “Saint Joan”.
“I was very privileged to have such a life,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview with The actor’s work. “I mean, it’s magical 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’s going to unfold in front of me.”
The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident with the news that West End theaters would dim their lights for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday in her honour.
Born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur theater group and Plowright was involved in theater from the age of 3. She was soon spending school holidays at the 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 Theater in London.
After his London stage debut in 1954, Plowright became a member of the Royal Court Theater in 1956 and became known in dramas written by the so-called Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne, which gave British theater a wide exposure. The new, raw, working-class actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins were his peers.
Plowright made his 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 was over, as was Olivier’s 20-year union with Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier were married in Connecticut in 1961, while they were both starring on Broadway, he in “Becket” and she in “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony.
A love letter Olivier sent summed up his love: “I sometimes feel such peace come over me when I think of you or write to you – a sweet tenderness and serenity. A feeling devoid of any violence, any passion or any overwhelming desire… that makes me go out into the street with a smile on my face and in my heart for everyone.
Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. After this, Plowright enjoyed a career resurgence at the age of 60, catering to both high-end tastes and more commercial fare.
She was in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Charlotte Brontë’s 1996 “Jane Eyre” and the Merchant-Ivory production of “Surviving Picasso,” as well as the role of the faithful nanny in Disney’s live-action remake of ” 101 Dalmatians” in 1996 with Glenn. Close.
She starred alongside Walter Matthau in the big-screen adaptation of the classic comic strip “Dennis the Menace” and made a brief appearance in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-referenced satire “Last Action Hero” in 1993.
Plowright became one of the few actresses to win two Golden Globes in the same year, 1993, when she won the television supporting actress award for “Stalin” and the actress award in a supporting role for “Enchanted April”. For the latter, which told the story of a group of British people seeing their lives transformed during a vacation in Italy, she received her only Oscar nomination.
Not all of his works have been career roses, as with the disastrous “The Scarlet Letter” with 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” drew no criticism.
Later in life, she played an important role as keeper of Olivier’s flame: awarding awards, defending her husband in the press, and organizing his letters.
“It’s my choice because I had the privilege of living with him,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2003. “When someone who had such fame, such idolatry and such cult is going away, then there’s bound to be a backlash coming the other way and you’re a little fed up Mine was really trying to set the record straight.
Plowright is survived by his three children — Tamsin, Richard and Julie-Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.
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Kennedy reported from New York.
