Joan Plowright, celebrated star of stage and screen, dies aged 95 | Joan Plowright

Actress Joan Plowright, celebrated for her long career in theater and film, has died aged 95, her family has announced.

Plowright won acclaim for performances in the early years of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court and National Theatre, when it was based at the Old Vic and led by her second husband, Laurence Olivier.

A statement from her family said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on 16 January 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career spanning seven decades in theatre, film and television until blindness forced her to retire.

“She loved her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family is deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.”

The Society of London Theatre announced that playhouses across London’s West End will dim their lights for two minutes in remembrance at 7pm on Tuesday. The organisation’s co-CEO, Hannah Essex, said: “Dame Joan Plowright was an iconic and deeply respected figure in the world of theater who left an indelible mark on the industry she shaped with her talent and dedication.”

Plowright and Olivier appeared together in the West End and on Broadway in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, as well as starring in the screen version. At the National she played Portia to Olivier’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice as well as roles including Masha in Three Sisters, Sonya in Uncle Vanya and the eponymous heroine of Shaw’s Saint Joan.

Plowright was born on 28 October 1929 in Brigg, Lincolnshire, and attended Scunthorpe Grammar School on a scholarship. She was the second of three children of Daisy Margaret Burton and William Ernest Plowright. Her mother was an amateur actress and opera singer who taught dance; her father was a journalist with a passion for am-drama. She always wanted to be an actor and won a drama trophy at a local theater festival at the age of 15. After leaving school at 17, she worked briefly as a supply teacher before training at the Old Vic Theater School in London.

After appearing in a late-night revue in London, she made her stage debut in 1948 in Croydon in a show called If Four Walls Told and then joined the Old Vic theater company, where she met the actor Roger Gage, whom she later married. She unsuccessfully auditioned to play Bianca in Orson Welles’ stage production of Othello. Remembering her, Welles cast Plowright as Pip the cabin boy in his West End version of Moby Dick in 1955.

The following year, when she arrived at George Devine’s English stage company, she “felt completely at home in a theater for the first time”, as she wrote in her memoir And That’s Not All. “I was in contact with people who were interested, as I was, in creating a theater that had to do with the 20th century. I found my own voice as an actress and an uplifting sense of purpose.” William Wycherley’s The Country Wife was her first success at the royal court, and over the years she appeared in plays as diverse as Arnold Wesker’s Roots, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara (in the title role) and Eugène Ionesco’s The Chairs and The Lesson, both of whom transferred to the Phoenix Theater in New York, where her co-star in The Chairs was Eli Wallach.

In 1957 Plowright took over for Dorothy Tutin in the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer when it transferred to the West End. It introduced her to Olivier, who played faded music-hall star Archie Rice, the father of her character. He had been impressed by Plowright’s performance in The Country Wife and jokingly renamed her “Miss Wheelshare”. The Entertainer was also made into a film, and Plowright would later select a recording of Olivier singing Why Should I Care? as Archie Rice for one of her selections on Desert Island Discs. She took the play to Broadway and later received a Tony Award as Jo, the pregnant teenager in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, with Angela Lansbury as her mother.

In 1960 Olivier and Plowright appeared in a stage production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros directed by Orson Welles at the Royal Court. That year, Plowright divorced Gage. In 1961, Plowright married Olivier following sustained media coverage of their relationship and the end of his marriage to Vivien Leigh.

Under Olivier’s leadership of the National, Plowright’s roles included Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Hilda Wangel in The Master Builder. In 1973, Franco Zeffirelli directed her in Eduardo de Filippo’s family drama Saturday, Sunday, Monday, where she told the Observer: “I had to make a ragout live on stage. The delicious smell sent people into the interval, looking happy but very hungry , and sandwich sales took off.” Zeffirelli directed her again in 1977 in De Filippo’s Filumena Marturano and again in 2003 in the Pirandello adaptation Absolutely! (Perhaps), both in London.

In 1988 Plowright directed a play about Marie Stopes, Married Love, and in 1990 she appeared with her two daughters, Julie-Kate and Tamsin Olivier, in a production of Time and the Conways directed by her son, Richard Olivier. By then, her film career had taken off. In Peter Greenaway’s Drowning By Numbers, she played the mother of Joely Richardson and Juliet Stevenson. There followed roles in an adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge’s The Dressmaker, the offbeat comedy I Love You to Death and Enchanted April, which was shot in Portofino on the Italian Riviera and earned her an Academy Award nomination for her performance as an imperial dowager. The hit film Tea With Mussolini brought her back to Italy and back to Zeffirelli, casting her alongside fellow ladies Maggie Smith and Judi Dench. She played a surrogate mother to a boy modeled after Zeffirelli.

In 2013, Plowright reprized her role as Saint Joan for a speech used at the National Theatre’s 50th birthday celebrations. In 2018, she recalled her career alongside Dench, Smith and Eileen Atkins in Roger Michell’s film Nothing Like a Dame.