Dame Joan Plowright, Celebrated English Actress and Tony Winner, Dead at 95

Dame Joan Plowright, one of the great English actors of both stage and screen died Thursday, Jan. 16, The Guardian reports. She was 95.

Plowright’s family confirmed her death, saying she died at a care home in Northwood, England for people who’d worked in theater. A cause of death was not given.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire,” Plowright’s family said. “She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories.”

To honor Plowright, the Society of London Theatre announced that theaters across the West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, Jan. 21. 

Plowright rose to prominence during the 1950s and 1960s, garnering acclaim for her work with the English Stage Company and later the National Theatre when it was led by her second husband, Laurence Olivier. She won the Tony for Best Actress in a Play in 1961 for her performance in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Decades later she received an Oscar nomination for her performance in Mike Newell’s historical drama Enchanted April. 

Though she lost the Oscar that year, she did win a Golden Globe for her performance in Enchanted April — one of two Globes she took home that night. The other was for her portrayal of Joseph Stalin’s mother-in-law in an HBO movie about the former Soviet leader. 

Plowright, born Oct. 28, 1929, grew up in the northeast of England and was drawn to acting at a young age through her mother, who led a local drama group. She eventually won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theater School in London, and Orson Welles gave her one of her earliest breaks with the only female part in his 1955 production, Moby Dick — Rehearsed. A real breakthrough came the following year, with a performance in The Country Wife, which garnered the attention of Olivier, who, in 1957, tapped Plowright to appear alongside him in a production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer. 
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In 1960, Plowright and Olivier starred in a film adaptation of The Entertainer, as well as a stage production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, directed by Welles. That same year, Plowright and Olivier divorced their respective spouses too; they married each other a year later. Olivier would direct Plowright in productions of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, while they also appeared together in a production of The Merchant of Venice. 

The majority of Plowright’s stage work was based in London, and after her Tony-winning performance in A Taste of Honey, she only returned to Broadway once more, when a production of Filumena (also known as The Best Hour in Naples) moved across the Atlantic in 1980. She also tried her hand at directing in 1988 with the play, Married Love, while in 1990, she appeared onstage alongside her daughters, Julie-Kate and Tamsin Olivier, in a production of Time and the Conways, directed by her son, Richard. 

In the Eighties, Plowright’s film and TV work picked up significantly. Along with Enchanted April, she delivered memorable turns in the 1990 comedy I Love You to Death (opposite Tracy Ullman and  Kevin Kline), and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1999 war dramedy, Tea With Mussolini. In 2003, she appeared in I Am David, the directorial debut of Paul Feig, who paid tribute to Plowright on X, “I was in over my head directing such a legend but she made it all so easy. I marveled at every take she did and learned so much from her.”

Plowright made her last film appearance in the 2009 thriller Knife Edge, though in 2018, she partook in the documentary, Tea With Dames, in which she reminisced about her career alongside other luminaries, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Eileen Atkins.