Joan Plowright, English actor of dazzling versatility, dies at 95

The result was The Entertainer (1957), about a third-rate music hall comedian and all-around louse named Archie Rice; Plowright played his worshipful daughter. Offstage she was besotted by his extraordinary good looks and artistic imagination.

Both were married: she to actor Roger Gage, he to the glamorous but tormented movie and stage star Vivien Leigh, who suffered from bipolar disorder. Recalling the early days of their relationship, Plowright later described being “touched by the bleakness in his face when he wasn’t acting or flirting”. They were inseparable as they performed The Entertainer on Broadway in 1958 and on-screen in 1960.

Plowright was quickly subsumed into Olivier’s social and professional orbit but maintained a richly varied career of her own. She went on to star onstage in A Taste of Honey, playing a cynical adolescent who becomes pregnant by a Black sailor and battles her alternately suffocating and neglectful mother.

She earned the 1961 Tony Award for best actress during its Broadway run but left the cast soon after her marriage to Olivier that March. She said she tried to bring ballast to his restless life, raising their three children at the cost of her professional momentum. “We didn’t want all the legend stuff. He had had it and didn’t want it any longer, and I had never had it and didn’t like it anyway,” she told the British publication TV Times. “I married a man, not a myth.”

At the Chichester Festival in 1962 and 1963, she appeared in her husband’s acclaimed productions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, two plays that had helped launch the National Theatre Company with Olivier as founder and artistic director. In the 1970s, she starred in two long-running hit comedies in London, The Bed Before Yesterday and Filumena, the first directed by Anderson, the second by her husband.

The few movie roles she accepted at the time included Sonya in a 1963 version of Uncle Vanya opposite Olivier as Dr Astrov and Michael Redgrave in the title role; Masha in Olivier’s 1970 screen adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters; the disturbing mother in Equus, a 1977 drama from Peter Shaffer’s play; and a prim seamstress looking after her sexually awakened teenage niece in The Dressmaker (1988), based on a novel by Beryl Bainbridge.

Her role in Enchanted April (1991), as a proper Briton with literary pretensions vacationing in Italy, earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. Marisa Tomei won the honour for the comedy My Cousin Vinny, but Enchanted April was a turning point in Plowright’s previously rare cinematic outings.

She began to lend her prestige – and her well-rounded vowels – to films such as The Scarlet Letter (1995) starring Demi Moore, director Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996) with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Tea with Mussolini (1999) opposite fellow English dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), as the lonely retiree who befriends a much younger man (Rupert Friend).

In Last Action Hero (1993), Plowright made a jesting appearance as a Hamlet-loving schoolteacher who shows her class a clip of her late husband Olivier’s movie version of the play. A daydreaming student imagines a weaponised Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Shakespearean drama, declaring: “Hey, Claudius, you killed my father. Big mistake.”

Joan Ann Plowright was born on October 28, 1929, in Brigg and raised in Scunthorpe, both in England’s industrial Midlands, where her father was a newspaper editor. Her stagestruck mother, who was involved in amateur theatre productions, encouraged her three children to perform.

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Plowright said she always felt “total confidence” onstage. “I liked disappearing into a character,” she told the Associated Press. “At 14, 15, I probably had more confidence onstage than I had off. I knew I could make people laugh and make them cry. I could make people look at me with more interest.”

She won a scholarship to the drama school of the Old Vic Theatre in London and was a stock company player with provincial repertory companies before Orson Welles selected her as the only woman in the cast of his 1955 staging of Moby Dick-Rehearsed, in which she was cast in the unlikely role of Captain Ahab’s black cabin boy, Pip.

The next year, she joined the nascent English Stage Co. In one of the company’s rare departures from contemporary drama, she impressed critics as the seductive and wily Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s 17th-century Restoration comedy The Country Wife.

In 1958, Plowright debuted on Broadway, under the direction of Richardson, in an Ionesco double bill, portraying an old crone in The Chairs (billed as a “tragic farce”) and a schoolgirl in The Lesson (a “comic drama”).

Months later, she was back on Broadway, reprising her Royal Court performance as Jean Rice in The Entertainer. She returned to England in the title role of Shaw’s Major Barbara, then gave an audacious comic performance as a murderous wife in Hook, Line and Sinker, Robert Morley’s adaptation of a French comedy by André Roussin.

And so Plowright went on for years, whisking from play to play with thunderous applause at each disappearance into her characters. As a farmer’s daughter who yearns for a life beyond her station in Wesker’s Roots, Plowright channelled rage and sympathy into an indelible performance.

She reunited with her husband at the Royal Court in 1960 under Welles’ direction in an ecstatically reviewed staging of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros but spent the remainder of her stage career mostly with the National Theatre Company, which Olivier spent the better part of a decade building into an institution.

By all accounts, including his own, Olivier was a joyfully mischievous but difficult, controlling man, prone to bouts of political backstabbing. He held a bitter grudge against director Peter Hall, who supplanted him at the helm of the National Theatre in the early 1970s. Olivier complicated his marriage with affairs, including a dalliance with 20-year-old actor Sarah Miles soon after Plowright gave birth to her first child.

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Olivier – Lord Olivier, thanks to a life peerage in 1970 – died in 1989 at 82. Survivors include their three children, Richard, Tamsin and Julie-Kate. One of her brothers, the late David Plowright, was longtime chairman of Granada Television.

Plowright, who was made a dame in 2003, acted as keeper of the Olivier flame amid a flurry of biographies that exhumed details of his reported bisexuality and Olivier’s wounding remarks about their marital separation – “Joan expected me to die when I was 70. Unfortunately, I didn’t”. She wrote a memoir, And That’s Not All, in 2001.

She earned an Emmy Award nomination for her performance in the HBO film Stalin (1992) as the Soviet tyrant’s mother-in-law. Explaining her forays into low-end comedies – among them Dennis the Menace (1993) with Walter Matthau and Bringing Down the House (2003) opposite Steve Martin and Queen Latifah – she told the Telegraph of London, “Now and again, it’s very liberating to be a bit silly and kick your heels up”.

Off-camera, she displayed little, if any, pretence and went out of her way to put younger actors at ease. “People know I was Lady Olivier,” she said, referring to the title she received by virtue of her marriage to Lord Olivier. “People say, ‘Your Ladyship’. They were addressing me that way. It was a lot to get through, so I just said: ‘My name is Joan, and I came here to work’.”

Washington Post

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