JOAN PLOWRIGHT
(28 October 1929 - 16 January 2025)
Lady Olivier, the actress Dame Joan Plowright, conquered the acting profession in whatever role she played. She flourished for the whole of her seventy years as an actress, polishing her talent to a level of excellence. She was a star player who graced the National Theatre in classic productions with her husband, Laurence Olivier. She joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court for its modern repertoire, and she played both the West End and Broadway. Classic films came her way, too, and she took to the cinema with absolute ease, while television gave her the chance to spread her acting wings further.
She was born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, to the actress Daisy Burton and the journalist William Plowright. Joan attended Scunthorpe Grammar and trained at The Old Vic Theatre School. She made her debut in Croydon Rep in 1948 and was then in the comic opera The Duenna at London’s Westminster Theatre in 1954. When John Osborne’s The Entertainer transferred to the Palace in the West End (from the Royal Court), she took over the part of Jean – the daughter of Archie Rice – from Dorothy Tutin. Olivier was Archie and that is how Larry met Joan and they married and worked together at the National Theatre.
Plowright’s big break came with Arnold Wesker’s Roots. Plowright was Beattie Bryant, a young woman who educates herself against the wishes of her Norfolk stick-in-the-mud family. The play opened at the Belgrade in Coventry and then moved to the Royal Court. Although Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey started life at Theatre Workshop in Stratford East London, Plowright played leading lady Jo to her mother Helen (Angela Lansbury) when the production hit Broadway. As well as working with Olivier at the National, she found success at Chichester, The Old Vic, the Lyric, the Queen’s, the Haymarket and the Vaudeville. She was particularly fond of working with Franco Zeffirelli on Filumena and was in his films Tea With Mussolini and Callas Forever.
Her film career was as adventurous as her stage work. The film of The Entertainer led to Uncle Vanya with Michael Redgrave as Vanya and Plowright as Sonya, in a film of the Chichester Festival production, co-directed by Olivier. There was more Chekhov in Three Sisters, again under Olivier. Then there were Equus with Richard Burton, Britannia Hospital directed by Lindsay Anderson, Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle with Sting, Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers, Barry Levinson’s Avalon and Mike Newell’s Enchanted April. She had a cameo in Last Action Hero (as a teacher introducing Olivier’s Hamlet), a nanny in 101 Dalmatians, and could be Lady Foxwell in Global Heresy with Peter O’Toole or a Mother Superior for George and the Dragon, Olga Alliluyeva to Robert Duvall’s Stalin, or just the voice of Victoria Plushbottom in Curious George. Nothing could faze her – she was up for everything.
On TV she played Portia in The Merchant of Venice, was Mrs Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, gave her Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, played Daisy in Driving Miss Daisy, was in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, and made scores of other shows that enlivened the TV schedules. Once seen, never forgotten could describe this great actor’s life. Plowright also won a Tony for A Taste of Honey on Broadway and Golden Globes for Stalin and Enchanted April, the latter for which she received her only Oscar nomination. Her memoir, And That’s Not All, appeared in 2001. She was first married to the actor Roger Gage from 1953 to 1960. After Olivier’s divorce from Vivien Leigh, the couple married in 1961 and remained together until Larry’s death in 1989. They had three children, Tamsin, Julie-Kate and Richard, all of whom work in the theatre. Due to macular degeneration, the actress’s sight declined dramatically from the late 2000s and in 2014 she revealed that she was legally blind. Nevertheless, she appeared alongside her lifelong friends Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in Roger Michell’s enchanting documentary Nothing Like a Dame, her final screen appearance.
In 1970 Joan Plowright was awarded the CBE and became a Dame in 2004.
MICHAEL DARVELL