Joan Plowright, a British actress who brought an innate dignity to her characters, whether she was playing an elegant, name-dropping dowager or a working-class teenager, died on Thursday in Northwood, England. She was 95.
Her daughter Julie-Kate Olivier said she died at Denville Hall, a retirement home for people in the theater.
Although she will always be associated with her 28-year marriage to Laurence Olivier, one of Britain’s most revered actors, Ms. Plowright had more than her share of shining moments.
She won a Tony Award for “A Taste of Honey” (1960), in which she played a teenage girl who becomes pregnant from a casual fling with a sailor (played by Billy Dee Williams). Three decades later, she earned an Oscar nomination for “Enchanted April” (1991), in which she played an upper-class 1920s Englishwoman who knew all the best Victorians. (When she was a child, her character recalls, a poet who used to visit always pulled her pigtails; naturally, it was Alfred, Lord Tennyson.)
In 1993, Ms. Plowright had a two-trophy night at the Golden Globes, winning two awards for best featured actress — for “Enchanted April” and for her portrayal of Josef Stalin’s disapproving mother-in-law in the 1992 HBO movie “Stalin.”
“Larry would have been so thrilled by all the fuss the Americans are making of me,” she told The Daily Mail, referring to her husband, who died in 1989.
Joan Ann Plowright was born on Oct. 28, 1929, in Brigg, a market town in northeastern England, and grew up in nearby Scunthorpe. Her father, William Ernest Plowright, was a newspaper editor, and her mother, Daisy (Burton) Plowright, who had once hoped for a ballet career, was active in amateur theater.
Joan, having worked with her mother’s drama group, landed a lead role in her high school play. She was Lady Teazle, the careless spendthrift young wife, in “The School for Scandal.” A year later, in 1948, she made her professional stage debut in Croydon, a town in South London.
The year after that, she won a scholarship to the Old Vic Theater School in London. She auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Orson Welles’s film adaptation of “Othello” (1951), but Welles was impressed and later invited her to be the only woman in the cast of “Moby Dick — Rehearsed,” which ran in London for three weeks in 1955. Parts of the play were filmed, but that film has been lost.
Her first big success on the London stage was as the title character in “The Country Wife” (1956), about a lusty newlywed who discovers that she adores city life for all sorts of delicious reasons.
When Olivier saw the play, he visited her backstage to introduce himself and congratulate her. Two years later, they appeared together onstage in John Osborne’s comic drama “The Entertainer,” as a seedy song-and-dance man and his sympathetic daughter. (Olivier was 22 years her senior.) Osborne, London’s hot new angry-young-man playwright, was an old neighbor of Ms. Plowright’s from Scunthorpe. (Olivier and Ms. Plowright later appeared together in a 1960 film adaptation of “The Entertainer,” directed by Tony Richardson.)
Beginning in 1956, Ms. Plowright worked with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theater in London. After “The Country Wife,” she had lead roles in plays including Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara” and Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros.” Olivier directed her there in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”
Ms. Plowright’s American theater career was relatively limited. Her Broadway debut was a double role in Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and “The Lesson” (1958). After her successes with Olivier (in transfers from London) and in “A Taste of Honey,” she returned to Broadway only once more — as the title character, a retired prostitute with a plan, in “Filumena” (1980).
Film eventually became a major part of her career. Her first was “Time Without Pity,” a 1957 drama. In “Equus” (1977), Peter Shaffer’s drama about an emotionally disturbed teenager who blinds a stable full of horses, she played the boy’s distraught religious mother. In “The Dressmaker” (1988), she was a prim and proper seamstress in wartime Liverpool.
Stepping up her work schedule after Olivier’s death, Ms. Plowright made 30 films in the 1990s and 2000s, not counting television movies, many of which were Shakespeare and Chekhov adaptations.
She and Tracey Ullman made comedy of trying to murder Kevin Kline, who played an unfaithful pizzeria owner, in “I Love You to Death” (1990). “Tea With Mussolini” (1999) cast Ms. Plowright as an expatriate in 1930s Florence whose pleasant ladies-who-lunch life is disrupted when Fascists come to power. In “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont” (2005), she played a widow trying to make a new, independent life as a young writer (Rupert Friend) brings her joy by pretending to be her grandson.
Sometimes Ms. Plowright portrayed the essence of maternal nurturing and warmth — as Mrs. Wilson, the neighborhood grouch’s much nicer wife, in “Dennis the Menace” (1993), for example, and as the dog nanny in “101 Dalmatians” (1996). “Those puppies are so trusting,” she told a reporter for The Times of London that year. “They are anybody’s for an orange.”
Her final screen acting roles placed her on large, mysterious country estates. In “Knife Edge” (2009), she played a nanny who suspects the bloody truth about the grand house where she now works. In “The Spiderwick Chronicles” (2008), she found herself living with fairies and demons.
She published a memoir, “And That’s Not All,” in 2001, and was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2004.
Ms. Plowright officially retired from acting in 2014, having lost her vision because of macular degeneration. But she appeared in the 2018 documentary “Tea With the Dames,” alongside her fellow dames and actresses Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.
In 1953, Ms. Plowright married Roger Gage, an actor she met while both were on a theater tour in South Africa. A year after her 1960 divorce, she and Olivier, who had just divorced Vivien Leigh, were married by a justice of the peace in Connecticut.
In addition to her daughter Julie-Kate, Ms. Plowright is survived by a son, Richard Olivier; another daughter, Tamsin Olivier; and four grandchildren. Her younger brother, David, a television producer, died in 2006.
In a 2018 BBC Radio interview, Ms. Plowright talked about the coping skills required when life fills with loss and imposes limits. “It’s my turn now, and I will build up the strength to deal with it,” she said.
She quoted from Max Ehrmann’s poem “Desiderata” (“Be careful and strive to be happy”), declaring happiness something “you have to work at,” and cited William Butler Yeats on “the fascination of things difficult.”
“It is fascinating,” she said, “to try and find out how you can cope.”
Robert Berkvist, a former New York Times arts editor who died in 2023, and Isabella Kwai contributed reporting.
