Joan Plowright, Acclaimed British Actress and Olivier’s Wife, Dies at 95: NPR

Joan Plowright has died aged 95. She is pictured above in 1975.

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British actress Joan Plowright, who brought stage and film characters to vibrant life for more than six decades in works such as A taste of honey and Enchanted April, died Thursday. She was 95.

Her family said in a statement that she died surrounded by family at Denville Hall in London. “She enjoyed a long and illustrious career spanning seven decades in theatre, film and television until blindness forced her to retire,” the statement read. “She loved her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with lots of laughter and great memories.”

Plowright, supremely dignified in recent years, was nasal and squeaky when she first impressed movie audiences as the adoring granddaughter of Laurence Olivier’s title character in John Osborne’s The Entertainer in 1960.

Plowright with her husband, actor and director Laurence Olivier.

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The two had played the same roles in the West End and Broadway stage versions, and soon after the film was released they married. Plowright spent the next 28 years closely associated with Olivier’s stage work as an actor and director, in everything from Eugène Ionesco’s avant-garde plays Rhinocerosto such classics as George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, Shakespeare’s Much ado about nothing and Anton Chekhov’s Three sisters.

After he died in 1989, she came into her own in such films as Tea with Mussolinias a British expatriate whose social life in Italy is disrupted when the Fascists come to power, Dennis the Menacewhere she played Martha Wilson, the wife of Dennis’s neighbor and nemesis, and her Golden Globe-winning performance in Enchanted April as a stern, cheerfully stiff widow who moves in literary circles.

Plowright retired from acting in 2014 after macular degeneration left her legally blind. But she was as funny as ever when she appeared as herself a few years later, gossiping, telling stories and wisecracking with acting legends Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in the TV documentary Nothing like a lady.

Plowright poses for pictures after being made a Dame by the Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace in London in February 2004.

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