UK theatre and film legend Joan Plowright dies, aged 95
Award-winning British actor Joan Plowright, who did much to revitalise the UK’s theatre scene in the decades after World War II, has died aged 95.
In a statement on 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 a generation of British actors, inlcuding Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, Plowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globes and nominations for an Oscar and Emmy.
Maggie Smith died last September, aged 89.
Plowright was also the wife of Laurence Olivier, a renowned English actor and director who died in 1989 at age 82.
‘Such a life’
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 publication 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.”
Theatres across West End in London will dim their lights for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday in her honour.
Born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur drama group and Plowright was involved in the theatre 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 theatre 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.”
Plowright enjoyed a career resurgence at the age of 60, doing a mixture of more upmarket productions and 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.
Rare accolades
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.
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.