Tony Award-winning actress Joan Plowright, widow of Laurence Olivier, dies at 95

LONDON (AP) – 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 World War II, has died. She was 95.

In a statement on Friday, her family said Plowright died the day before at Denville Hall, a nursing home for actors in southern England, surrounded by loved ones.

“She enjoyed a long and illustrious career spanning seven decades in theatre, film and television until blindness forced her to retire,” the family said. “We are so proud of everything Joan did and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive person.”

Part of an astonishing generation of British actors, including Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith, Plowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globes and nominations for an Oscar and an Emmy. She was made a lady by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright landed dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull to William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. She surprised in Eugene Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and George Bernard Shaw’s totemic two female roles “Major Barbara” and “Saint Joan”.

“I’ve been very privileged to have a life like that,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview with The work of the actor. “I mean, it’s magic, and I still feel when a curtain goes up or the lights come on, if there’s no curtain, the magic of a beginning of what will unfold before me.”

The esteem in which Plowright was held in London was evident with the news that theaters across the West End will dim their 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 the theater from the age of 3. She was soon spending school holidays attending summer sessions at university drama schools. After high school she studied at the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, after which she won a two-year scholarship to the drama school at the Old Vic Theater in London.

After making his stage debut in London in 1954, Plowright joined the Royal Court Theater in 1956 and gained recognition in dramas written by the so-called Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne, who gave British theater a thorough airing. The new, rough-hewn, working-class actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Anthony Hopkins were her peers.

Plowright made his feature film debut with an uncredited turn in American director John Huston’s epic adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” in 1956, starring Gregory Peck as the possessed Captain Ahab.

A year later she starred with her future husband Olivier in the original London production of Osborne’s “The Entertainer”. She played Olivier’s daughter in the play, and the two were 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 were married in Connecticut in 1961 while both were starring on Broadway, he in “Becket” and she in “A Taste of Honey,” for which she won a Tony.

A love letter that Olivier sent summed up his love: “I sometimes feel such a serenity come over me when I think of you or write to you—a gentle tenderness and serenity. A feeling devoid of all violence, passion, or crushing longing … it makes me go out into the street with a smile on my face and in my heart for everyone.”

Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. Plowright then experienced a resurgence of career at the age of 60, satisfying both exclusive tastes and more commercial food.

She appeared in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” in 1996 and the Merchant-Ivory production of “Surviving Picasso,” as well as starring as the faithful nanny in Disney’s live-action remake of “101 Dalmatians” in 1996 with Glenn Tät.

She starred opposite Walter Matthau in the film adaptation of the classic cartoon “Dennis the Menace”, and appeared briefly in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-referential satire “Last Action Hero” in 1993.

Plowright became one of only a handful of actors to win two Golden Globes in the same year, in 1993, when she won the supporting television award for “Stalin” and the supporting motion picture award for “Enchanted April.” For the latter, which told the story of a group of Britons who find their lives transformed on a holiday to Italy, she received her only Oscar nomination.

Not all of her works were career roses, as with the disastrous “The Scarlet Letter” starring Demi Moore and a pilot that went nowhere for a TV series based on “Driving Miss Daisy.” An appearance alongside Chevy Chase in the 2011 holiday family comedy “Goose on the Loose” failed to impress critics.

A prominent role in later life was the keeper of the Olivier flame – awarding awards, defending her husband in the press and curating his letters.

“It’s my choice because I was privileged to live with him,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2003. “When someone who’s had such fame and idolatry and adoration leaves, there’s definitely a backlash, which comes the other way and you get a little tired of that. Mine really tried to fix things.”

Plowright is survived by his three children – Tamsin, Richard and Julie-Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.

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Kennedy reported from New York.