Joan Plowright obituary: great dame of British stage and screen
Shrewd intelligence and impeccable comic timing were the hallmarks of the late-flourishing film career of the great theatre star Dame Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95.
Joan Plowright came late to film, but she flourished mightily on arrival. One of Britain’s great post-war actresses, her highly successful stage career – from 1950s Royal Court groundbreakers to Broadway hits – and her dedication with husband Laurence Olivier, in the 1960s, to the UK’s National Theatre, meant that “films seemed to have passed me by”. But after Olivier’s death in 1989, she threw herself into a late-burgeoning cinema career, which saw her pull off a rare Golden Globes double, winning Best Supporting Actress in both film and TV categories in 1993 for her grouchy grande dame in Enchanted April (1991), and for the TV mini-series Stalin (as the Red Tsar’s fiercely disapproving mother-in-law).
Born in Brigg, Lincolnshire, she got her stage start at the Old Vic Theatre School, and made her name at the new Royal Court Theatre, especially for her defiant Beatie in Arnold Wesker’s 1959 Roots. Plowright had already turned down a Boulting brothers’ film contract in 1957 to play opposite Olivier in The Entertainer (on stage and in Tony Richardson’s 1960 film version) before winning a Tony on Broadway in A Taste of Honey (1961). For the next 30 years she was fiercely committed to stage work: “You do film if the roof needs mending.”
Accordingly, her onscreen appearances were largely limited to modest adaptations of her theatre successes with Olivier, like her spitfire Masha in 1970’s stagey Three Sisters, and a mature but combative Portia in Jonathan Miller’s production of The Merchant of Venice (ITV, 1973). But startling film turns in more challenging contemporary pieces, such as the self-righteous mother in Equus (1977), and as Brimstone and Treacle’s stir-crazy Mumsie (in 1982’s film version), showed what she was capable of.
By the late 1980s, her screen roles were picking up steam, showing off her versatility as she went toe-to-toe with a wolfish Harold Pinter as the impermeably naive Mrs Bowles in a BBC TV version of The Birthday Party (1987), and calmly killed an errant husband in Peter Greenaway’s dark and playful Drowning by Numbers (1988). She found a hidden tyranny in the outwardly fearful spinster aunt in The Dressmaker (1988), leading Lawrence Kasdan to cast her as a conniving mother-in-law in the OTT black comedy I Love You to Death (1990), where her shrugging performance garnered the biggest laughs.
By the early 1990s, her powerful screen presence had brought her a successful run of domineering matrons in period movies, either cluckingly genial, such as Avalon’s family-ruling matriarch (1990), or cantankerous but complex, like Mrs Fisher in Enchanted April, Plowright’s most celebrated screen role.
Restricted to juicy supporting parts, her shrewd intelligence and fine comic timing made her a frequent scene-stealer in middling movies like rural comedy Widows’ Peak (1994), and as the cosiest of English nannies in 101 Dalmatians (1996). In Surviving Picasso (1996), she found herself gallingly playing Anthony Hopkins’ grandmother-in-law, when years before they had played lovers on stage. However, Zeffirelli’s dame-fest Tea with Mussolini (1999) made deft use of Plowright’s distinctive warmth (and her melodic, quavering voice) as the motherly Shakespeare-reciting Mary.
Though she remained mostly an ensemble player until her retirement from acting in 2014 due to macular degeneration, she had one exceptional leading role left. Her sweetly stoical and dignified performance as the eponymous Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 2005 gave this gentle comedy an extraordinary poignancy and charm.
Her last film appearance, in the chatty BBC documentary celebration of four great British actresses Nothing like a Dame (2018), was characteristically shrewd and funny, and gave no quarter: “My US agent used to say ‘We’ll look around for a nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn’t got her paws on.’”
Joan Plowright, 28 October 1929 to 16 January 2025