‘A nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn’t got her paws on’: Joan Plowright’s screen career actually blossomed with age | Film

ISLANDOne of Joan Plowright’s greatest screen performances came towards the end of her career: a gloriously subtle, lovable performance on Roger Michell’s 2018 documentary Nothing Likea Dame, with four great ladies of British acting – Plowright, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith – gather as Marvel superheroes at the country house Plowright shared with her late husband Laurence Olivier to drink tea and exchange outrageous anecdotes and sharp observations about the acting profession and the sexism they and their younger colleagues continue to face.

The then 89-year-old Plowright, despite his failing health and eyesight, exchanges affectionate badinage with the others: “My agent in America, knowing I couldn’t do much because of my eyesight, said to me, ‘Well , if you want to come back, we’ll look around for a nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn’t gotten her hands on.'” (Dench replies sickeningly: “How rude!”)

The association with Olivier was important: Plowright had her film breakthrough in The Entertainer in 1960, the kitchen-sink film adaptation of John Osborne’s hit play, in which she had also appeared on stage with Olivier. The role revived Olivier’s career: declining old vaudeville tour Archie Rice, whose tattered act symbolizes Britain’s own post-war self-doubt. Plowright played neither Rice’s wife nor the young woman with whom he has an illicit affair – but rather his troubled daughter: a performance of intelligence, sensitivity and humility. After the film was released, Plowright married Olivier, after his divorce from Vivien Leigh had gone through, and both Olivier and Plowright thrived on her caring, supportive calm and strength, which she also brought to the screen.

Plowright’s looks and style arguably came into their own in her later years as a prominent character actor, mainly in supporting roles, where she excelled in a number of films. She was the robustly assertive mother-in-law Eva in Barry Levinson’s Avalon in 1990 and a commanding presence in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre in 1996 as Mr. Rochester’s housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax. For better or for worse, she starred in many “old lady” films such as Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini in 1999 as the British expatriate Mary Wallace, one of the waspish-minded women who regularly meet in Florence in the Fascist 1930s. She was the querulous Mrs Fisher in Mike Newell’s Enchanted April in 1991 (again with an Italian setting) and had another formidable matriarchal role in John Irvin’s comedy-drama Widows’ Peak in 1994. These films and Plowright’s roles were perhaps all passed up by Nothing Like a Lady where Plowright showed the glimmer of humor not commonly available to her in many scripts.

Plowright arguably found something more to sink his teeth into with the 1988 film The Dressmaker, based on the novel by Beryl Bainbridge – an author whose comedic vision is tailored to Plowright – in which Plowright played the fiercely lanky and respectable 1940s dressmaker in Liverpool, appalled that her sister and niece are in love with GIs.

But perhaps the role she was born to play was the lead role in Dan Ireland’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 2005 – a straight-America production of Elizabeth Taylor’s much-loved poignant 1971 novel, in which Plowright is the questionable widow who finds herself stranded at an upscale, melancholic “retirement hotel” and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young man. Plowright is excellently cast and the role shows her ability to show the vulnerability behind the tough front. The idea of ​​her character in a retirement hotel echoes bittersweetly with her own final years at Denville Hall, the acting retirement home.

Perhaps her career flourished as much or more on stage – but the films showed us a performer of authority, intelligence and gentleness.