British actress Joan Plowright, who brought stage and screen characters to vibrant life for more than six decades in such works as A Taste of Honey and Enchanted April, died Thursday. She was 95.
Her family said in a statement that she died surrounded by family at Denville Hall in London. "She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire," the statement read. "She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories."
Supremely dignified in later years, Plowright was nasal and squeaky when she first made an impression on movie audiences as the adoring granddaughter of Laurence Olivier's title character in John Osborne's The Entertainer in 1960.
The two had played the same parts in the stage version on the West End and Broadway, and shortly after the movie came out, they married. Plowright spent the next 28 years closely associated with Olivier's stage work as actor and director, in everything from Eugène Ionesco's avant-garde play Rhinoceros, to such classics as George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters.
After he died in 1989, she came into her own in such films as Tea with Mussolini, as a British expatriate whose social life in Italy is disrupted when Fascists come to power, Dennis the Menace, in which she played Martha Wilson, wife of Dennis' neighbor and nemesis, and her Golden Globe-winning performance in Enchanted April as a stern, hilariously rigid widow who travels in literary circles.
Plowright retired from acting in 2014 after macular degeneration had left her legally blind. But she was as amusing as she'd ever been when appearing as herself a few years later, gossiping, storytelling and cracking wise with fellow acting legends Maggie Smith and Judi Dench in the TV documentary Nothing Like a Dame.
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