Joan Plowright, Acting Legend of Stage and Screen and Laurence Olivier’s Widow, Dies at 95

Joan Plowright, perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century and the widow of Laurence Oliver, died on Thursday. She was 95.

Plowright was a prominent actress of stage and screen in her own right, especially in her native England, and was a Tony winner for “A Taste of Honey.” The actress had retired in 2014 after going blind due to macular degeneration.

Her family confirmed the news of her death to The Guardian on Friday, writing: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95. She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family are deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.”

Related Stories

VIP+

What Snap Needs to Jumpstart U.S. User Growth: A TikTok Ban

SEC Accuses Elon Musk of Failing to Disclose Twitter Stock Purchases in 2022

Theaters across London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes at 7 p.m. on Jan. 21 in remembrance of Plowright, the Society of London Theatre announced shortly after the news broke of her death.

She was nominated for an Oscar for 1991’s “Enchanted April,” winning a Golden Globe for her role in the Mike Newell-directed film about four mismatched Englishwomen sharing an Italian villa. The New York Times said she was “uproariously funny as Mrs. Fisher, a commanding older woman who becomes Rose and Lottie’s unlikely roommate” and “booms through the film dropping the names of literary eminences she once knew through the connections of her distinguished father.”

Plowright was no stranger to comedy: She was a standout in Lawrence Kasdan’s black comedy “I Love You to Death,” in which she played the mother of Tracy Ullman’s character, the wife of a pizzeria owner (Kevin Kline) who has cheated on her; Plowright’s mother urges her to have him killed, and hilarity ensues. Roger Ebert said, “Joan Plowright might seem like an unlikely choice as the mother, but gets the movie’s biggest laugh in a bedside scene.”

The actress also did television and was nominated for an Emmy in 1993 for her role in the HBO telepic “Stalin,” starring Robert Duvall.

Though she was first and foremost a creature of the theater, Plowright made a number of prominent appearances in feature films including not only “Enchanted April” and “I Love You to Death” but “Tea With Mussolini,” Barry Levinson’s “Avalon,” the Irish-set comedy “Widows’ Peak” and 2005’s “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.”

Plowright first came to prominence among those unfamiliar with the English stage thanks to her work in Tony Richardson’s brilliant 1960 film “The Entertainer,” based on the play by John Osborne and featuring a tour de force performance from Olivier as a dance hall performer facing existential defeat. She was nominated for the BAFTA Award for most promising newcomer for her role in the film in which she played his daughter, but the pair started an affair prior to the film, when they were in the stage production, that scandalously ended his two-decade marriage to actress Vivien Leigh. Plowright, who was also married when the affair started, became Olivier’s third wife — Lady Olivier — in March 1961.

To escape the scandal of the divorce from Leigh, Olivier and Plowright headed for New York, where each appeared on the stage, he in “Becket,” she in Shelagh Delaney’s “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony as best actress in a play.

Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England on Oct. 28, 1929.

She appeared in amateur theater productions as a child, and won an amateur theater prize at age 15 and after high school did a stint at the Laban Art of Movement Studio. She made her professional stage debut in a 1948 production of “If Four Walls Could Talk,” then received a two-year scholarship to study at the prestigious Old Vic Theatre School in London. In 1954 she made her London stage debut, and two years she later became a member of the Royal Court Theatre, where she appeared in such productions as “The Crucible,” Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and Shaw’s “Major Barbara and Saint Joan.” During a performance of “The Country Wife,” Olivier first noticed Plowright and was instantly smitten.

Plowright would eventually join Olivier at the National Theatre, which he founded in the early 1960s. At the National she appeared in “St. Joan,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Three Sisters,” “Tartuffe,” “Back to Methuselah,” “The Advertisement,” “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “The Merchant of Venice” and “A Woman Killed With Kindness,” among others; later she starred in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in 1981-82, “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Way of the World,” “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” “The House of Bernarda Alba” and “Time and the Conways.”

She had appeared on British television as early as 1951, in the series “Sara Crewe,” as well as in a 1954 adaptation of “The Comedy of Errors” for “BBC Sunday-Night Theatre” and starred in Richard B. Sheridan’s play “School for Scandal” for a 1959 edition of the BBC program “World Theatre.”

The actress made her feature debut in the Joseph Losey-directed 1957 thriller “Time Without Pity,” starring Michael Redgrave and Ann Todd, and after 1960’s “The Entertainer,” she appeared as Sonya in a 1963 feature adaptation of “Uncle Vanya” that starred Michael Redgrave and also featured Olivier as Dr. Astrov.

For a substantial period, the actress divided her time between occasional acting gigs and raising her three children by Olivier, then returned to her profession with gusto at the age of 60.

She played Masha in the Olivier-directed feature adaptation of Chekhov “Three Sisters” (1970) and starred with Olivier in a 1973 TV adaptation of “The Merchant of Venice.”

Plowright played the mother of the disturbed boy in the 1977 feature adaptation of “Equus,” starring Richard Burton, drawing her first BAFTA Award nomination. The same year, she appeared in a Granada Television adaptation of Eduardo de Filippo’s play “Saturday, Sunday, Monday,” about the goings on in a large Italian family as the weekend unfolds, with Olivier as the paterfamilias and Plowright as his daughter-in-law, who prepares the Sunday feast that is central to the weekend.

The actress played Mrs. Frank opposite Maximilian Schell in a 1980 NBC adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” played Lady Bracknell in a 1986 BBC adaptation of “The Importance of Being Earnest” and starred with Robert Guillaume in a 1992 TV movie adaptation of “Driving Miss Daisy.”

In Richard Loncraine’s 1982 feature “Brimstone and Treacle,” Plowright played the gullible mother, whose husband is played by Denholm Elliott, menaced by the evil character played by Sting. She was the best thing in the disaster that was Hugh Hudson’s “Revolution,” starring Al Pacino, in which Plowright played the mother of Nastassja Kinski’s character.

In 1988, she starred with Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson in auteur Peter Greenaway’s “Drowning by Numbers.” While the film was rather puzzling, the Washington Post said Plowright was “wonderfully wry.” The following year, she starred with Billie Whitelaw in “The Dressmaker” as Nellie, a woman outraged by change in an American-beset Liverpool during WWII. The New York Times said, “Miss Plowright moves through the film with the imperiousness of the ferociously genteel, which doesn’t mean that Nellie can’t improvise when the situation demands it.”

In Levinson’s “Avalon” (1990), she played the matriarch of the large Russian-Jewish family in Baltimore, always squabbling “entertainingly,” as the Times put it, with her husband, played by Armin Mueller-Stahl. In “Widows’ Peak,” set in a small Irish town in the wake of WWI, she played a dowager who rules over a large number of women made widows by the recent war.

As a treat for her grandchildren, she played Mrs. Wilson in the 1993 adaptation of “Dennis the Menace” opposite Walter Matthau, and Nanny in the 1996 live-action retelling of “101 Dalmations” that focused on Glenn Close’s Cruella De Vil; she also played Aunt Lucinda in 2008’s “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” (About the last of these, Roger Ebert enthused, “The movie is distinguished by its acting, not least by the great Joan Plowright.”)

Generally, as Plowright entered her mid to late 60s in the 1990s, the screen roles grew smaller and less interesting. She was fine as Mrs. Fairfax in Zeffirelli’s 1996 adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” but the character has little to do. In “Surviving Picasso,” starring Anthony Hopkins, she played the grandmother of the artist’s mistress.

In the late ’90s, the actress signed on a series regular for NBC’s “Encore! Encore!,” starring Nathan Lane as a former opera star who returns home to the family winery and Plowright as his mother; the series’ run was brief.

Working again with Zeffirelli, the actress starred with Cher, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Lily Tomlin in 1999’s “Tea With Mussolini.” The film is a semi-autobiographical tale co-penned by the director about his boyhood in 1930s Florence, when his closest companion was an old British lady (Plowright), who was hired to raise him to be a perfect English gentleman and brought him into the company of the other Anglophone expats living in the area. Again for Zeffirelli, she appeared in a supporting role in the director’s strange 2002 paean to his friend Maria Callas, “Callas Forever,” starring Fanny Ardant.

Plowright threw herself into a supporting role in the 2003 Steve Martin-Queen Latifah vehicle “Bringing Down the House,” with its awkward racial and sexual politics. And then in 2006, when the actress was 77, she starred in a charming if sentimental movie aimed at an older crowd, “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont,” about a woman, seeking independence, who stumbles upon a London hotel full of older eccentrics.

She made her Broadway debut in Ionesco’s “The Chairs and the Lesson,” directed by Tony Richardson, in 1958, a year in which she also appeared on the Rialto with Olivier in a transfer of “The Entertainer.” Decades later, in 1980, she starred on Broadway with Frank Finlay in “Filumena,” an original production by Franco Zeffirelli directed by Olivier.

In Herbert Kretzmer’s book “Snapshots: Encounters With Twentieth Century Legends,” the author quotes Plowright: “Everybody, outside the theater, thinks that actors and actresses are soppy people, and that acting is like having a lovely hobby. The truth is that actors are more tremendously disciplined than most. I was taught very early to leave my troubles at the stage door — all my aches and pains and domestic upsets.”

She was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1970, and was promoted to Dame in 2004. In 2018, she appeared in Roger Michell’s documentary “Nothing Like a Dame” alongside Plowright’s fellow dames Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Olivier died in 1989. Plowright’s brother, David, was an executive at Granada Television who died in 2006.

Plowright was married to actor Roger Gage from 1953 to 1960. She divorced him to marry Olivier.

She is survived by a son, actor-director Richard Olivier and two daughters, actresses Tamsin Olivier and Julie Kate Olivier, as well as a number of grandchildren.