Joan Plowright, award-winning actress and Olivier’s widow, dies aged 95

Joan Plowright, the British actress who brought an innate dignity to her characters, whether she was playing an elegant, nameless widow or a working-class teenager, died Thursday in Northwood, England. She was 95.

Her daughter Julie-Kate Olivier said she died at Denville Hall, a care home for people who have worked in the theater industry.

Although she will always be associated with her 28-year marriage to Laurence Olivier, one of Britain’s most revered actors, Ms. Plowright more than his share of brilliant moments.

She won a Tony Award for “A taste of honey” (1960), starring a teenage girl who becomes pregnant from a casual fling with a sailor (played by Billy Dee Williams). Three decades later, she earned an Academy Award nomination for “Enchanted April” (1991), in which she played an upper-class 1920s Englishwoman who knew all the best Victorians. (When she was a child, her character remembers, a poet who used to visit always pulled her pigtails; naturally, it was Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)

In 1993, Ms. Plowright had a double-trophy night at the Golden Globe Awards, winning two awards for best actress — for “Enchanted April” and for her portrayal of Josef Stalin’s disapproving mother-in-law in the 1992 HBO film “Stalin.”

“Larry would have been so excited about all the fuss the Americans are making of me,” she told The Daily Mailreferring to her husband who had died in 1989.

Joan Ann Plowright was born on 28 October 1929 in Brigg, a market town in north-east England, and grew up in nearby Scunthorpe. Her father, William Ernest Plowright, was a newspaper editor, and her mother, Daisy (Burton) Plowright, who had once hoped for a ballet career, was active in amateur theatre.

Joan, after working with her mother’s drama group, landed a lead role in her high school play. She was Lady Teazle, the careless spendthrift young wife, in “The School for Scandal”. A year later, in 1948, she made her professional stage debut in Croydon, South London.

The following year she won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theater School in London. She auditioned unsuccessfully for Orson Welles’s film adaptation of “Othello” (1951), but he was impressed and later invited her to be the only woman in the cast of “Moby Dick — Rehearsed,” which ran in London for three weeks in 1955 .Parts of the play were filmed but lost.

Her first big success on the London stage was as the title character in “The Country Wife” (1956), a bright newlywed who discovers she loves city life for all sorts of delicious reasons.

When Olivier saw the play, he visited her backstage to introduce himself and congratulate her. Two years later they appeared together on stage in John Osborne’s comedy drama “The Entertainer”, as a sleazy song-and-dancer and his sympathetic daughter. (Olivier was 22 years older than her.) Mr. OsborneLondon’s hot new angry-young-man playwright, was an old neighbor of Ms. Plowright’s of Scunthorpe.

From 1956, Ms. Plowright with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater in London. After “The Country Wife,” she had starring roles in plays including Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” and Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” Olivier directed her there in productions including Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

Mrs. Plowright’s American theater career was relatively limited. Her Broadway debut was a dual role in Mr. Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and “The Lesson” (1958). After her successes with Olivier (in transfers from London) and in “A Taste of Honey,” she returned to Broadway only one more time – as the title character, a retired prostitute with a plan, in “Filumena” (1980).

Film eventually became a major part of her career. Her first was “Time Without Pity,” a 1957 drama. In “Equus” (1977), Peter Shaffer’s drama about an emotionally disturbed teenager who blinds a stable full of horses, she played the boy’s distraught religious mother. In “The Dressmaker” (1988) she was a primitive and proper seamstress in wartime Liverpool.

Plowright stepped up his work schedule after Olivier’s death, making 30 films in the 1990s and 2000s, not counting television films (many of which were Shakespeare and Chekhov adaptations).

She and Tracey Ullman did comedy trying to murder Kevin Kline (who played an unfaithful pizzeria owner) in “I love you to death” (1990). “Tea with Mussolini” (1999) cast Ms. Plowright as an expatriate in 1930s Florence whose comfortable lady-who-lunch life is disrupted when fascists come to power. In “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” (2005), she played a widow trying to create a new, independent life when a young writer (Rupert Friend) brings her joy by pretending to be her grandson.

Sometimes Mrs. Plowright portrayed the essence of maternal care and warmth—as Mrs. Wilson, the neighborhood’s much prettier wife, for example in “Dennis the Menace” (1993), and as the dog girl in “101 Dalmatians” (1996). “Those puppies are so trusting,” she told a reporter for The Times of London that year. “They’re anyone for an orange.”

Her final acting roles placed her on large, mysterious country estates. In “Knife Edge” (2009), she played a nanny who suspects the bloody truth about the big house where she now works. In “The Spiderwick Chronicles” (2008), she found herself living with fairies and demons.

She published a memoir, “And That’s Not All”, in 2001 and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2004.

She officially retired from acting in 2014, after losing her sight due to macular degeneration. But she appeared in the 2018 documentary “Tea With the Dames” along with other ladies and actresses, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

In 1953 married Ms. Plowright became involved with Roger Gage, an actor she met while both were on a theater tour in South Africa. A year after her divorce in 1960, she and Olivier, who had just separated from Vivien Leigh, were married by a Connecticut justice of the peace.

In addition to her daughter Julie-Kate, Mrs Plowright is survived by a son, Richard Olivier; another daughter, Tamsin Olivier; and four grandchildren. Her younger brother, David, a television producer, died in 2006.

In one 2018 BBC Radio interviewMrs. Plowright spoke of the coping skills required when life is filled with loss and limits. “It’s my turn now and I will build the strength to deal with it,” she said.

Quoting from Max Ehrmann’s poem “Desiderata” (“Be careful and strive to be happy”), she declares happiness as something “you have to work at”, and quoted William Butler Yeats about “the fascination of things that are difficult .”

“It’s fascinating,” she said, “trying to figure out how you can pull it off.”

Robert Berkvista former New York Times arts editor who died in 2023 contributed reporting. Isabella Kwai contributed with reporting.