British actress Joan Plowright dies aged 95

LONDON – Oscar-nominated British actress Joan Plowright, a legend of stage and screen and wife of the late great British actor Laurence Olivier, has died at the age of 95, her family said on Jan 17.

“It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on Jan 16, 2025, surrounded by her family at Denville Hall at the glorious age of 95.

“Her brilliant career will be remembered by many, her wonderful being always cherished by her children Richard, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, their families and Joan’s many friends,” they added.

Plowright was one of the leading actresses of her generation.

Her career was largely played out in the theatre, often opposite her husband, but following his death in 1989, she began to find more roles on screen.

Her later film and television work introduced her to new generations, with two films in particular that took her to Italy.

In the 1991 film Enchanted April, set in the 1920s, she played the acid-tongued Mrs Fisher, for which she missed out on an Oscar to American actress Marisa Tomei.

The other film that took her to Italy was Franco Zeffirelli’s 1999 film Tea With Mussolini, set in Florence in 1935, in which she teamed up with two other dames of the English stage, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench.

In 1993, she became one of the few actors to have won two Golden Globes in the same year, one for Enchanted April and the other for the HBO TV series Stalin.

She also appeared in films that attracted a younger audience, such as Dennis The Menace (1993), Last Action Hero (1993) and 101 Dalmatians (1996).

‘Momentous, earth-shattering’

Plowright suffered macular degeneration which gradually caused her to go blind, leading her to retire from acting in 2014.

“It is a wrench,” she admitted at the time.

“But it is (a decision) that everybody has to make some time in their life and when you have had a very good life and been lucky, which I have, well, you say, ‘it’s my turn now’.”

Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, a small market town in eastern England, where her father edited the local newspaper.

“You’re no oil painting, my girl, but you have the spark,” said Plowright’s mother, before she headed off to the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, adding “you have lovely eyes and thank God you have my legs and not your father’s”.

Plowright made her London debut in 1954 and two years later caught the critics’ eye.

One evening, Olivier came backstage to meet her with his then wife, British actress Vivien Leigh.

The following year, Plowright played opposite Olivier in the original London production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer.

Soon after, she divorced her first husband Roger Gage and Olivier ended his 20-year marriage to Leigh, leaving the path open to their own marriage in 1961.

“It was momentous, earth-shattering for me... a very, very strange experience,” she said of her marriage to Olivier, in a BBC documentary.

“It was a great privilege to share in his life, as well as a bit of a nightmare.”

Never as glamorous as her predecessor, who had achieved cinema immortality as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind (1939), Plowright said she had never been jealous of Leigh.

“It wasn’t as though I was competing with her. It might sound arrogant, but I didn’t really think much about it,” she told The Guardian newspaper.

Alongside Olivier

Plowright won a Tony for her performance in A Taste Of Honey in 1961, but then began to adjust her career to accommodate her husband as he directed the Chichester Festival Theatre and then launched the National Theatre.

This included performing alongside Olivier – on stage she received plaudits for her Sonya to Olivier’s Uncle Vanya – although she also took time off completely to have three children.

Plowright always rated her Saint Joan at London’s Old Vic theatre in 1963 as her finest work.

“That is the sort of part that all young women want to play,” she told the BBC in 2018.

“I would always say, though, that I enjoyed having played it but actually doing it was very hard work.” AFP