Tony Award-winning British actor Joan Plowright, famed for her roles in “kitchen sink” dramas on stage, and the widow of Laurence Olivier, has died.
Joan Plowright, an English actor whose marriage to Laurence Olivier conferred on her instant rank among the theatrical nobility and who carved her own considerable and singular place on the British stage, died on Thursday at a retirement home in Northwood, England. She was 95.
Proudly ensconced at what she called “the rebel outpost”, Plowright said she and her colleagues were determined to stage a pitchfork rebellion against the polite British theatre that had long reflected upper-middle-class tastes – an establishment sensibility in many ways personified by “Sir Larry” Olivier, the most acclaimed Shakespearean actor of his generation., about a third-rate music hall comedian and all-around louse named Archie Rice; Plowright played his worshipful daughter.
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.
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, in which she was cast in the unlikely role of Captain Ahab’s black cabin boy, Pip.
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