Award-winning British actress Joan Plowright, who along with her late husband Laurence Olivier did much to revitalize Britain's theater scene in the decades after the Second World War, has died. She was 95.
In a statement on Friday, her family said Plowright died the day before at Danville Hall, a retirement home for actors in southern England, surrounded by her loved ones.
“She had a long and brilliant career in theatre, film and television spanning seven decades until blindness forced her retirement,” the family said. “We are very proud of all that Joan has accomplished and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive person.”
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Part of an amazing generation of British actors, incl Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie SmithPlowright has won a Tony Award, two Golden Globes, and Oscar and Emmy nominations. Queen Elizabeth II made her a woman in 2004.
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright performed dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov's The Seagull to William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. She stunned in Eugène Ionesco's Armchairs and George Bernard Shaw's two totemic female roles, Major Barbara and St. Joan.
“I've been very privileged to have this life,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview. The work of an actor. “I mean, it's magic, and I still feel when the curtain goes up or the lights come on, when there's no curtain, the magic of the beginning of what's going to unfold before me.”
The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident from the news that theaters around the world West End dim the lights for two minutes at 7pm on Tuesday in her honour.
Born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur drama group, and Plowright was involved in theater from the age of 3. Soon she was spending her school holidays at the summer sessions of university drama schools. After high school, she studied at the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, followed by a two-year scholarship to drama school at the Old Vic Theater in London.
After making her London stage debut in 1954, Plowright became a member of the Royal Court Theater in 1956 and gained recognition in plays written by so-called Angry Young Men such as John Osborne, who gave the British theater a refined air. New, gritty, working-class actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Anthony Hopkins were her peers.
Plewright made her feature film debut in American director John Huston's epic adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick in 1956, starring Gregory Peck as the possessed Captain Ahab.
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A year later, she starred with her future husband Olivier in Osborne's original London production of The Entertainer. She played Olivier's daughter in the production, and they reunited for the 1960 film adaptation.
By then, Plowright's marriage to British actor Roger Cage had ended, as had Olivier's 20-year union with Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier married in Connecticut in 1961 while both were on Broadway, he in “Beckett” and she in “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony.
In one of his love letters, Olivier summed up his love: “Sometimes I feel such a peace come over me when I think of you or write to you – a gentle tenderness and peace. A feeling devoid of all violence, passion and passionate longing. .. it makes me go out with a smile on my face and in my heart to everyone.”
Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. After that, Plowright experienced a career renaissance in his 60s, catering to both elite tastes and more commercial fare.
She starred in Franco Zeffirelli's version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1996 and Merchant-Ivory's production of Living in Picasso, and starred as the steadfast nanny in Disney's 1996 remake of 101 Dalmatians with Glenn. It's close.
She co-starred with Walter Matthau in the adaptation of the comic book classic Dennis the Menace and had a brief appearance in the Arnold Schwarzenegger satire The Last Action Hero in 1993.
Plowright became one of the few actors to win two Golden Globes in 1993, when she won the Television Award for Best Supporting Actress for Stalin and the Best Supporting Actress for Enchanted April. For the latter, which tells the story of a group of Britons whose lives are changed during a vacation in Italy, she received her only Oscar nomination.
Not all of her work was career roses, as in the disastrous “Scarlet Letter” starring Demi Moore and the pilot that did not go to series based on “Driving Miss Daisy.” Appearing alongside Chevy Chase in the 2011 holiday family comedy Goose on the Run was not met with critical acclaim.
The keeper of the fire Olivier played an outstanding role in her later life — presenting awards, defending her husband in the press and overseeing his letters.
“It's my choice because I was privileged to live with him,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2003. – If someone who had such fame, idolatry and worship leaves, there will definitely be a backlash that will come in the other direction and you will be a little sick of it.
Plowright is survived by three children, Tamsin, Richard and Julie-Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.