Joan Plowright, award-winning actress and widow of Olivier, dies at 95

Joan Plowright, the British actress who brought an innate dignity to her characters, whether she played an elegant, renowned dowager or a working-class teenager, died Thursday in Northwood, England. She was 95 years old.

Her daughter Julie-Kate Olivier said she died at Denville Hall, a care home for people who had worked in the theater industry.

Although she will always be associated with her 28-year marriage to Laurence Olivier, one of Britain’s most revered actors, Ms Plowright has had more than her share of shining moments.

She won a Tony Award for “A Taste of Honey” (1960), playing a teenager who becomes pregnant following a casual fling with a sailor (played by Billy Dee Williams). Three decades later, she earned an Oscar nomination for “Enchanted April” (1991), in which she played an upper-class Englishwoman in the 1920s who knew all the best Victorians. (When she was a child, her character recalls, a visiting poet always pulled her pigtails; naturally, it was Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)

In 1993, Ms. Plowright took home two trophies at the Golden Globe Awards, winning two best actress awards — for “Enchanted April” and for her portrayal of Joseph Stalin’s disapproving mother-in-law in the 1992 HBO film “Stalin.” .”

“Larry would have been so thrilled with everything the Americans are doing about me,” she told the Daily Mail, referring to her husband, who died in 1989.