Dame Joan Plowright: Acting star whose first love was theatre
2025-01-17
Category: entertainment

Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, was one of Britain's finest stage actresses - and later found fame on the cinema screen, although she largely preferred stage work. The Tony and Golden Globe-winning actress once said movies were a fall-back to pay the bills, saying: "You do films if the roof needs mending."Theatre audiences enjoyed the her versatility and good humour, and her 1961 Tony-winning Broadway role A Taste of Honey saw her play a troubled teenager, with Angela Lansbury as her mother.Other notable stage roles include Saint Joan in 1963 and Saturday, Sunday, Monday a decade later, along with films including 1992's Enchanted April and Tea with Mussolini in 1999.She was also married to acting great Sir Laurence Olivier for 28 years, until his death in 1989.After he died, Plowright continued to act into her 80s, until failing sight forced her retirement.
Joan Ann Plowright was born on 29 October 1929 in Brigg, Lincolnshire.Her mother, Daisy, was a keen amateur actor and by the age of three, her daughter had taken to the stage.She went to Scunthorpe Grammar School before studying drama at the Bristol Old Vic.Her mother encouraged her choice of career, albeit with brutal candour."You're no oil painting," said Daisy, "but you've got the spark. Just thank God you've got my legs, and not your father's."
She made her stage debut as a professional actress, in Croydon, in 1948 and by 1956, she had joined the Royal Court theatre in London.At the time, the Royal Court was a hotbed of new talent, specialising in controversial works. It was also the spiritual birthplace of the kitchen-sink drama.Plowright gained recognition in a series of productions penned by this group of Angry Young Men, in roles that relied on acting ability rather than mere glamour.As the daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, she was far from working-class - but her down-to-earthiness and emotion honesty helped bring British theatre up to date.
In 1957, she co-starred with Sir Laurence Olivier in a production of John Osborne's play The Entertainer.Olivier, who was playing Archie Rice, was at the peak of his acting career and considered something of a matinee idol.Plowright played his daughter and the actors' mutual respect led to romance. "Nothing is so sexy in a man as talent," she observed.She was initially cautious about a relationship with him - Olivier was 22 years older and already one half of Britain's most celebrated theatrical couple, married to Vivien Leigh.Plowright herself was married to fellow actor Roger Gage.But Leigh, Sir Lawrence's second wife, who was troubled by mental illness,  divorced Olivier in 1960. Plowright and her husband divorced the same year.
A year later, Olivier married Plowright in Connecticut - around the same time she won a Tony award on Broadway for her role in A Taste of Honey.The couple were soon appearing together in a series of plays in Chichester, in the UK, including a notable staging of Uncle Vanya.The Guardian's Michael Billington called it "one of the great Chekhov experiences of the 20th Century...that brought tears to my eyes".They went on to have three children, but their marriage was not without its difficulties. "He has extremes of behaviour, which you understand," she later said. "You just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons."
Their relationship also led her to refuse for five years to appear at the National Theatre, where her husband was director from 1962–1973.The actress felt  she would have been vulnerable to accusations of favouritism. Eventually though, she took a contract with the theatre for a decade, in far grander roles than those at the Royal Court.By now, her husband had been elevated to the peerage - which made her Lady Olivier - but she didn't use the title.
Plowright won a Golden Globe and was Oscar-nominated for her appearance in the 1992 film Enchanted April.In fact, she won two Golden Globes in one year - the other coming for HBO TV movie Stalin.Her other films included Three Sisters in 1970 and The Merchant of Venice in 1973 - both opposite her husband and both based on National Theatre productions.She also played Mrs Fairfax in 1996's Jane Eyre, and her range went far beyond the classics in films like Dennis the Menace, Last Action Hero and 101 Dalmatians.As Lord Olivier's health declined, his wife accepted her first big-screen role in the 1990 black comedy I Love You to Death, with Kevin Kline and Tracey Ullman. In 1989, Lord Olivier died of kidney failure , at the age of 82.A decade later, the actress garnered acclaim in Franco Zeffirelli's autobiographical 1999 film Tea with Mussolini, alongside her close friends, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
Dame Joan found work a great solace following her husband's death, appearing in a dozen films between 2000 and 2010.They included 2003's I Am David, about a boy who escapes a gulag in Bulgaria, and the comedy Bringing Down the House, starring Steve Martin, from the same year. However, she clearly saw the silver screen as a poor cousin of the theatre."One can't pretend that most film dialogue is all that challenging," she said. "You do films if the roof needs mending."As if in agreement, the theatre in her native Scunthorpe renamed itself in her honour.Her chief obstacle to more theatre work was her eyesight, she had macular degeneration, which made the stage increasingly difficult. In 2014, blindness forced her retirement from all types of acting.Four years later, she appeared alongside three old friends - Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench - in a BBC Arena film, Nothing Like a Dame.The grandes dames of British theatre reminisced about their lives and careers, with searing honesty and humility.Filmed in the garden of the home she had shared with Olivier, Plowright spoke candidly about how she had tried to avoid playing Cleopatra at the National Theatre, feeling that she would be mocked for her lack of beauty."They all assume we think we're the bee's knees," she confessed. "They don't realise that we're shaking inside."