Award-winning British actress Joan Plowright, widow of Laurence Olivier, has died aged 95

LONDON — Award-winning British actor Joan Plowright, who was one half of a theatrical power couple after marrying Laurence Olivier, 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 and nominations for an Oscar and an Emmy. She received the title of dame from Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright racked up dozens of stage roles, from Chekhov’s “The Seagull” to 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”.

Plowright has appeared in plays by John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker. The new, raw, working-class actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins were his peers.

“I’ve been very privileged to have such a life,” Plowright said in an interview with The Actor’s Work in 2010. “I mean, it’s magical and I always feel, when a curtain goes up or the lights come on if there is no curtain, the magic of a beginning of what will unfold before me”,