Joan Plowright, Venerable Legend of the British Stage, Dies at 95
Joan Plowright, the distinguished actress of the post-war British stage whose considerable skill as a performer was at times eclipsed by her fame as the third and last wife of Laurence Olivier, has died. She was 95.
Plowright died Thursday in London, her family said in a statement to the BBC. “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.”
More from The Hollywood Reporter
They added: “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.”
A Tony Award winner in 1961 for Tony Richardson and George Devine’s A Taste of Honey and an Oscar nominee for Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991), Plowright belonged to a celebrated group of British actresses (Judi Dench and Maggie Smith among them) who came into their own in the 1960s and ’70s.
These women did not have the romantic appeal, their insouciant charm or the heartbreaking looks of some of their predecessors. But they had something else — raw talent — that helped them become household names, first in England and later the world.
Almost all grew up in working- or middle-class homes; almost all made their mark on the stage long before film and television; and almost all were beneficiaries of a tidal wave of change in the British theater that had begun in the late 1950s when a handful of “Angry Young Men” took aim at the glamorous, upper-class, frivolous and sometimes facetious characters of playwrights such as No?l Coward and Terence Rattigan and put blue-collar characters center stage instead.
It was through the foremost of these Angry Young Men, John Osborne, that Plowright became involved with Olivier in 1957 when she was 28 and he was 50. Plowright had only recently arrived at London’s avant-garde and left-wing Royal Court Theatre when she was cast as Sir Laurence’s daughter in Osborne’s The Entertainer, the story of an aging music hall performer struggling to maintain some sort of dignity in his waning days.
The actress, who later admitted that she never cared for the role (it was not “fully three-dimensional,” she said), was as shocked as her colleagues when Olivier condescended to leave the West End and appear at the Court, the equivalent of off-Broadway. He was theater royalty; more than that, he was an international superstar who hobnobbed with the rich and mighty, and here he was, slumming it for ￡50 a week.
What Plowright didn’t realize was that he had reached a crisis point, both personally and professionally. “I was going mad,” he explained, “desperately searching for something suddenly fresh and thrillingly exciting.”
He found it not only in Osborne’s work but also in a relationship with the younger actress. Their affair, which began on Nov. 28, 1957 — when Olivier recorded in his diary that he had spent the night “with Joanie” — was complicated by the fact that he was married to Vivien Leigh, one of the most famous women on the planet, a two-time Oscar winner and an extraordinary beauty, while Plowright herself was still married to her first husband, actor Roger Gage.
To Leigh’s horror, after trying to break free of his affair and spending time away from both women while he shot Spartacus, Olivier told his wife he was leaving her for Plowright, whom he married in 1961, soon after his divorce became official. Leigh made the affair public well before then, when Plowright found herself besieged by reporters after Leigh, in one of the manic episodes that had blighted her marriage (part of her long and tormented history with bipolar disorder), announced that Olivier was leaving her for another woman, just as he had left his first wife, actress Jill Esmond, for Leigh.
Plowright’s love affair with Olivier was both her triumph and her tragedy: It propelled her to fame but for years prevented her getting her due as a performer. Despite her considerable success and critical plaudits, that only truly changed when she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004, 15 years after Olivier’s death at age 82 on July 11, 1989.
Born in the country market town of Briggs, Lincolnshire, on Oct. 28, 1929, in the less affluent north of England, Joan Ann Plowright was the daughter of a local newspaper editor and his homemaker wife, a gifted dabbler in amateur dramatics who encouraged her daughter to act.
“I learned sort of fairly early on that I felt rather confident onstage,” she told Andrew MacKay in a 2010 British Library interview. “I felt more confident being somebody else on stage than I felt being myself in real life.”
Her early memories were shaped by the bigger town of Scunthorpe, an agricultural center that was in the midst of becoming an industrial hub. Her family moved there when she was just a toddler, and its local theater is now named after her.
“Within the next 10 years,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir, And That’s Not All, “Scunthorpe was to become a ‘boom’ town, producing more steel than Sheffield … My mother, who had loved the quiet and the space and the freedom to walk alone, was filled with a deep unrest and a yearning to escape, and she began the first of her exhortations to us three children to get out and away in search of a more promising world.”
Plowright did that the moment she left Scunthorpe Grammar School, winning a place at London’s Old Vic Theatre School, where she studied in a bombed-out building that had been struck during the Blitz and had yet to be repaired. (Her brother David did the same, rising to become chairman of Granada Television.)
At the Vic, Plowright trained under the famed trio of directors Devine, Michel Saint-Denis and Glen Byam Shaw. “The uniqueness of the triumvirate who ran the Old Vic Theatre School lay in the fact that they were not primarily teachers but practicing professionals,” she recalled. “All three were directing plays at the Old Vic Theatre and thus, as well as handing out criticism to their students, they were on the receiving end of it themselves from critics in the national press.”
After her graduation, Plowright found an agent and began to get work, not least a small role in Orson Welles’ adaptation of Moby Dick at the Duke of York’s Theatre. “Rehearsals were long, arduous and chaotic,” remembered “Snooks,” as Welles nicknamed her in summer 1955.
“Some days Orson would be in a thundering bad temper, changing scenes and dialogue all the time and working with the actors into the night. Other days he would be chuckling and wreathed in cherubic smiles as some kind of order began to emerge. On yet other days he would suddenly abandon us altogether, being forced to dodge the attempts of exasperated creditors to have their writs served upon him.”
It was, nonetheless, “the most brilliantly imaginative, exciting and unpredictable theatrical experience of my life.”
(A less successful reunion with Welles followed in 1960, when the maestro directed Plowright and Olivier in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The hyper-organized Olivier and hyper-chaotic Welles — good friends until that point — clashed, and eventually Olivier told Welles to stay away from rehearsals while he got the production into shape. “Orson was bitterly hurt,” noted Plowright.)
Other roles followed, both with the Bristol Old Vic (not to be confused with the London version) and with a group that toured apartheid-era South Africa, where the actress was appalled to see a white farmer shove a black man into the gutter.
In 1956, Devine invited her to join the newly formed English Stage Company, to be based at the Royal Court, and there, Plowright said, “I felt for the first time totally at home in a theater. I was in touch with people who cared, as I cared, about creating a theater that was to do with the 20th century. I found my own voice as an actress, and an exhilarating sense of purpose, which had been sadly lacking elsewhere.”
Joining forces with dazzling young impresarios such as Richardson and John Dexter, Plowright discovered a remarkable generation of writers — not just Osborne but also Arthur Miller, Arnold Wesker, Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Many of the people she worked with “were the product of a free and better educational system and state scholarships to Oxbridge [Oxford and Cambridge Universities],” she noted, adding that they shared a ferociously irreverent attitude toward the prevalent ruling classes. “Often of semi-proletarian origin and from the provinces, they were surprisingly sophisticated, articulate and self-confident.”
While Plowright did not star in the seminal play of that era, Osborne’s 1956 drama Look Back in Anger, the badge it gave to a theatrical generation stuck to her just as much as it did her male colleagues. “It was shortsighted of people to label us ‘kitchen sink’ or ‘angry young men’ [and women],” she observed, “but we were all irretrievably identified with that image after Look Back in Anger, whether we had appeared in it or not.”
She got to know Olivier through the Court. They were separated by years, tastes, politics and ideology. “In our eyes, he represented everything my generation was trying to change in the theater,” she acknowledged. But their feelings shifted when Plowright took over the part Dorothy Tutin had created in The Entertainer after the play transferred from the Royal Court to the Palace Theatre and then went on tour.
Working with Olivier, she found him to be “bristling with energy, and his smile was full of mischief; it was as though he had been let off a leash … he had banished all traces of that titled gentleman of the Establishment. He was simply an actor among actors, but one of such extraordinary accomplishment, and with such electricity crackling around him, that I was both exhilarated and exhausted by the end of the day.”
Escaping the hullabaloo that accompanied the Oliviers’ break-up, Plowright took Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey to Broadway, where it opened the night before Olivier’s Beckett and won her a Tony in 1961.
Once married, Olivier left London and abandoned his country house, Notley Abbey, moving with Plowright to Brighton, where they remained for most of their time together. With her, he created a very different image from the one he had helped spawn as half of the golden couple “Larry and Viv.” Although Plowright technically became Baroness Olivier when her husband was elevated to the House of Lords in 1970, she never used the title.
She and Olivier subsequently worked together on several notable productions, including acclaimed versions of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters (both by Plowright’s favorite author, Chekhov) at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where Olivier served as artistic director, and then at the National Theatre, when Olivier ran that institution. So closely was Plowright associated with his work and regime that when he stepped down, there was serious talk she might replace him, though that job eventually went to Peter Hall.
Her other stage roles include a widely admired Saint Joan in the George Bernard Shaw play; Portia in The Merchant of Venice, opposite Olivier’s Shylock; Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew (with Anthony Hopkins as Petruchio); and leads in two plays by Eduardo De Filippo, Filumena and Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
In addition to the 1960 movie version of The Entertainer, her film résumé included Sidney Lumet’s Equus (1977), Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), Dennis the Menace (1993), Last Action Hero (1993), 101 Dalmatians (1996), Franco Zeffirelli‘s Tea With Mussolini (1999) and Bringing Down the House (2003). She retired in 2014.
Survivors include the three children she had with Olivier, Richard, Tamsin and Julie-Kate, and four grandchildren.
A natural comedienne, Plowright learned to mask her inner feelings with laughter, as The Guardian noted following the publication of her autobiography. “Laughter is her element, I am surprised to discover,” its reporter observed. “She has a laugh that has been there, roared at that: smoky, charged, contagious. There is almost no question that doesn’t earn a wail or a hoot. She has learnt the art of ‘laughing it off,’ a technique for getting through life, sailing onward and, at times, she rolls her eyes upward as she laughs, as if appealing to the corners of the room for help.”
That laughter was fully evident in 2018’s Nothing Like a Dame (released in the U.S. as Tea With the Dames), Plowright’s last major onscreen appearance. Elderly and blind as a result of macular degeneration, she sat around a table in her country home with old friends and rivals Dench and Smith, along with Eileen Atkins, as the four actresses reminisced about their lives in front of director Roger Michell’s loving camera.
Plowright survived Olivier by more than three decades after years supporting him through long and excruciatingly painful illnesses — and years in which they lived largely separate lives. Rather than wax lyrical about her notoriously difficult spouse, she huffed and smiled and admitted that “it was a bit of a nightmare sometimes.”
She was as down-to-earth as Leigh was quixotic, as rooted in reality as the first Lady Olivier was at times removed from it. A pragmatist who saw theater as a practical matter that depended on technique as well as art, she nonetheless recognized the complexity of any great actor — which applied not just to her husband but to herself as well.
“We are all full of several personalities,” she said in the British Library interview. “Kierkegaard said, ‘An actor is essentially a hysteric,’ because he, for two hours, believes he’s somebody else. … I needed to be an actress; I needed what it gave me. I needed to explore all the I’s that were within me.”
Stephen Galloway is dean of the film school at Chapman University.
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
