LONDON (AP) – Joan Plowright, the award-winning British actor who, along with her late husband Laurence Olivier, helped revitalize British theater in the decades after World War II has died. . She was 95 years old.
Plowright passed away the day before, surrounded by loved ones, at Denville Hall, a nursing home for actors in the south of England, his family said in a statement on Friday.
“She had a long and distinguished career in stage, film and television that spanned more than 70 years before her retirement due to blindness,” her family said. “We are so proud of everything Joan has done and the loving and inclusive person she is.”
Part of a remarkable generation of British actors that included Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith, Plowright won a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, an Oscar and an Emmy Award. was nominated for. She was conferred a title by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.
File/British actress Joan Plowright on May 4, 1973 at the South Bank in London, England. (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
From the 1950s to the 1980s, Plowright performed dozens of stage roles in everything from Anton Chekhov's “The Seagull” to William Shakespeare's “The Merchant of Venice.” She gave excellent performances in Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs and in George Bernard Shaw's two totemic female roles, Major Barbara and St. Joan.
“I was very privileged to have lived this life,” Plowright said in a 2010 interview. actor's job. “I mean, this is magic. When the curtains go up, or when there are no curtains and the lights come on, I still feel the magic of the beginning of things unfolding before my eyes.”
Born Joan Ann Plowright in Brigg, Lincolnshire, England, her mother ran an amateur theater group, and Plowright was involved in theater from the age of three. She soon began spending her school holidays attending summer classes at her university's drama school. After high school, she studied at the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester and then won a two-year scholarship to drama school at the Old Vic Theater in London.
After making his stage debut in London in 1954, Plowright became a member of the Royal Court Theater in 1956, where he became a member of the so-called “Angry Young Men” such as John Osborne, who was giving British theater a thorough airing. He gained fame through the dramas he wrote. Her allies included rough-hewn, working-class new actors like Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Anthony Hopkins.
Plowright made his uncredited feature film debut in American director John Huston's 1956 blockbuster adaptation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, starring Gregory Peck as the obsessed Captain Ahab.
A year later, she co-starred with her future husband, Olivier, in Osborne's London original The Entertainer. She played Olivier's daughter in the film, and the two reunited for the 1960 film adaptation.
By then, Plowright's marriage to British actor Roger Cage had ended, as had Olivier's 20-year marriage to Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier married in Connecticut in 1961, and both have starred on Broadway, he in Beckett and her in A Taste of Honey, for which she won a Tony Award.
One love letter sent by Olivier sums up his love: Emotions that are devoid of violence, passion, and crushing longing…that's what makes me go out into the street with a smile on everyone's face and a smile on my mind. ”
Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. Plowright then revived his career at the age of 60, catering to both high-end and more commercial tastes.
File/Laurence Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright attend the announcement of the title. July 1970. (Photo by Maurice Kaye/Staff/Mirrorpix, Getty Images)
She appeared in Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 Charlotte Bronte version of Jane Eyre and Merchant Ivory's The Survival of Picasso, and co-starred with Glenn in Disney's 1996 live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians. She played the role of a strong nanny. close.
She starred opposite Walter Matthau in the big-screen adaptation of the classic comic strip Dennis the Menace, and in 1993 starred in Arnold Schwarzenegger's self-referential satire The Last Action Hero. He also appeared for a short period in “.
Plowright won Best Supporting Actress on TV for Stalin and Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for The Enchanted April in 1993, making her one of the few actors to win two Golden Globe Awards in the same year. There was only one person. The latter, which tells the story of a group of Brits who find their lives changed while on vacation to Italy, earned her her only Academy Award nomination.
Not all of her films have been career successes, such as the disastrous Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore and the failed pilot for a TV series based on Driving Miss Daisy. . Her appearance alongside Chevy Chase in the 2011 holiday family comedy Goose on the Loose did not provoke any criticism.
A prominent role in her later years was as keeper of Olivier's flame, awarding awards, defending her husband in the press, and managing his letters.
“It was my choice because it was an honor to live with him,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2003. That's kind of disgusting. My boyfriend was really trying to make things right. ”
Plowright is survived by three children, Tamsin, Richard and Julie-Kate, all actors, and several grandchildren.
