Joan Plowright, the heralded actress of stage and screen who was also the widow to Laurence Olivier, has passed away. Dame Joan Plowright was 95.
A native of Lincolnshire, England, Joan Plowright – who studied at the famed Bristol Old Vic Theatre School – first made her London stage debut in the mid-’50s. Soon after, she was working alongside Laurence Olivier, then already a well-established icon of the stage and screen himself, having combined these talents in an almost unprecedented way with Henry V and Hamlet. (He was also fresh off of his divorce from Vivien Leigh.)
The month after Joan Plowright married Olivier, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for A Taste of Honey. Plowright remained committed to the stage, steadily appearing in productions into the early ‘90s. Some key productions include The Crucible; Uncle Vanya; Three Sisters; Saturday, Sunday, Monday; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; and The House of Bernarda Alba.
Even still, Joan Plowright was quite prominent on the screen, too. She earned a BAFTA nomination early on for Most Promising Newcomer for The Entertainer, later earning another nod for Best Supporting Actress for Equus. She would work with Barry Levinson in Avalon, play a charming opposite to Walter Matthau in Dennis the Menace and turn up in The Spiderwick Chronicles. The most acclaim she received, however, came with 1991’s Enchanted April, for which she earned her Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. She would win the latter and again win a statue for television movie Stalin, a role that also landed her an Emmy nomination.
In a statement via BBC, Plowright’s surviving family members wrote, “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95. She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories.”
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