Remembering Joan Plowright

The name of Joan Plowright, who has died at the age of 95, will forever be associated with that of her second husband, Laurence Olivier. But, as Cinema Paradiso reveals, she was feted in her own right for the consistent excellence of her work on both stage and screen.

Critics had a tendency to qualify their praise for Joan Plowright. One went so far as to describe her as 'an engagingly unglittering leading actress with a challenging intelligence'. The numbers are decreasing of those who saw her in her heyday with the Royal Court and the National Theatre at the Old Vic. But her role in linking the classical and contemporary traditions in British theatre becomes more significant with time. Her films are also important for affording us a hint of the vivacity and versatility that made Plowright such a fine performer.

'We are all full of several personalities,' she revealed in an interview for the British Library. 'Kierkegaard said, "An actor is essentially a hysteric," because he, for two hours, believes he's somebody else...I needed to be an actress; I needed what it gave me. I needed to explore all the I's that were within me.' Cinema Paradiso salutes them all.

Lucky Legs

Coming between two brothers, Joan Ann Plowright was born in Brigg, Lincolnshire on 28 October 1929. Father William was a journalist from Worksop in Nottinghamshire, while mother Daisy (nee Burton) hailed from Kent. When Joan was a toddler, the family moved to Scunthorpe, where William became the editor of the Scunthorpe & Frodingham Star.

As Plowright wrote in her 2001 memoir, And That's Not All, 'Within the next 10 years, Scunthorpe was to become a "boom" town, producing more steel than Sheffield...My mother, who had loved the quiet and the space and the freedom to walk alone, was filled with a deep unrest and a yearning to escape, and she began the first of her exhortations to us three children to get out and away in search of a more promising world.' Daisy put a picture of a snow-capped mountain in her daughter's bedroom and Plowright revealed on Desert Island Discs in 1981 that the image had made her keen to explore the world.

When not having crockery-smashing arguments with her husband, Daisy took sanctuary in amateur theatricals and the local operatic society. Yet, it was William who founded the Scunthorpe Little Theatre Club that still meets in the venue that now bears the Plowright name. Joan started acting at the age of three and was once given charge of the spaniel that her mother had acquired to play Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barrets of Wimpole Street.

Daisy encouraged her children to play the piano and occasionally took them to concerts in Leeds. They also paid visits to the cinema and Plowright recalls sending a fan letter to Laurence Olivier after seeing him as Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939). She later wrote, 'Of course it would be a letter from his secretary, signed by him. But I didn't know that at the time.'

Joan attended Scunthorpe Grammar School, where she did well at English and French. She also became involved in school productions and was cast as Lady Teazle in John Brinsley Sheridan's The School For Scandal. At 15, she won a drama award that came with the chance to appear in a play with the Harry Hanson Repertory Company. She told Roy Plomley that it was a tatty show, with actors missing their entrances because they were playing cards. But she so enjoyed playing a maid 'plumping cushions and dusting' that she travelled to London to meet Hanson wearing her new coat and velvet beret. Intimidated by having to sit in a waiting room with older woman in fur coats, Plowright recalled, 'Mr Hanson raised his eyebrows in disbelief as I came through the door. He sat at a desk, with overflowing ashtrays. I told him I'd won his cup and said I wanted to act. He looked at me, kindly and avuncular, pointed to the wastebaskets stuffed with letters and said: "Go home, my dear, go home."

Although she still wanted to be an actress or a dancer, Plowright also considered becoming a missionary. However, on leaving school at 17, she spent a year as a supply teacher at her alma mater because she was too young to enrol at the newly opened Old Vic Theatre School. William fully supported her decision, although Daisy reminded her daughter, 'You're no oil painting, but you've got the spark. Just thank God you've got my legs, and not your father's.'

Snooks Makes Her Mark

Following a stint with the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester, Plowright landed a scholarship at the Old Vic Theatre School, which was run by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, and Glen Byam Shaw. As she later explained, 'It was a very extensive training, and one that would fit an actor for any company, any period, whether it was classical, contemporary or even musicals, because we had classes in fencing, acrobatics, art of movement, dance, speech delivery, voice, singing, and style classes where you learnt the style of text, you know to be able to deliver a text in the style that was necessary. You can't do contemporary kind of rhythms in Molière.'

As a new generation of British, American, and European playwrights had started to emerge after the Second World War, Plowright found herself in the vanguard of a new cadre (many of whom, like herself, were from the provinces) and they took stage drama in a new direction. Ironically, however, her first professional engagement saw her spend three weeks in a tiny London theatre in a late-night revue alongside Ian Carmichael. Thence, she took herself to Croydon to play Hope in Edward Percy's 1920s comedy, If Four Walls Told (1948). This led to a tour of South Africa, where her ability to hold a tune led to the role of Allison in the Julian Slade musical, The Merry Gentleman, at Bristol Old Vic. Slade was sufficiently impressed to offer Plowright the part of Dona Clara in his musical take on Sheridan's The Duenna, which brought her to the West End for the first time in 1954.

Three years earlier, Plowright had auditioned for Bianca in Orson Welles's screen adaptation of Othello (1951), only for the role to go to Doris Dowling. Welles had apologised and promised to atone and kept his word by casting Plowright as Pip the cabin boy in his 1955 stage production of Moby Dick. She was the only woman in a cast that also included Patrick McGoohan, Kenneth Williams, Gordon Jackson, and Welles as Captain Ahab.

'Some days,' Plowright remembered, 'Orson would be in a thundering bad temper, changing scenes and dialogue all the time and working with the actors into the night. Other days he would be chuckling and wreathed in cherubic smiles as some kind of order began to emerge. On yet other days he would suddenly abandon us altogether, being forced to dodge the attempts of exasperated creditors to have their writs served upon him.'

Critic Kenneth Tynan called the play, 'a sustained assault on the senses which dwarfs anything London has seen since, perhaps, the Great Fire'. Similarly awestruck, Plowright claimed it was 'the most brilliantly imaginative, exciting and unpredictable theatrical experience of my life'. Parts of the play were filmed, although Moby Dick Rehearsal has sadly disappeared. Nevertheless, Plowright took away some invaluable advice from Welles (who had nicknamed her 'Snooks') that lasted her a lifetime. He taught her never to presume that she would always please everyone with her performance and reminded her that each time she stepped upon to a stage, a certain percentage of an audience would not go for her chemistry. It was her duty, therefore, to make sure that they left the theatre admiring her skill.

While the role didn't make Plowright a star, it earned her a contract at the Nottingham Playhouse. However, former tutor George Devine summoned her to join his English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, which had become the spiritual home of kitchen sink drama after Tony Richardson had directed John Osborne's controversial Look Back in Anger (1959) - which Richardson would film with Richard Burton in 1959.

Such bold contemporary pieces thrilled the critics, but they didn't always bring in the punters. Consequently, after she had found her place within the company in five plays that had included Arthur Miller's Thc Crucible and Bertolt Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan, Devine cast Plowright as Margery Pinchwife in a 1957 revival of William Congreve's The Country Wife that filled the coffers and brought the actress to the attention of the British film industry.

Having settled in London after being blacklisted during the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's inquiry into Communism in Hollywood, Joseph Losey cast Plowright as Agnes Cole in Time Without Pity (1957), which had been adapted from a play by Emlyn Williams. Agnes's sister has been murdered by her boyfriend, Alec (Alec McCowan). However, his father, David (Michael Redgrave), is determined to save his son from the gallows. Plowright found the filming process strange and Devine persuaded not to sign a seven-year contract with director twins, John and Roy Boulting, who were keen to reunite her and co-star Laurence Harvey in a modern-day version of The Country Wife.

Convinced that she would be typecast if she moved into cinema, Plowright stuck to the stage. Down to earth and emotionally honest, she fitted right in with the Royal Court ethos in productions like Nigel Dennis's The Making of Moo (1957). But she was now in demand and made her Broadway bow opposite Eli Wallach in a pair of one-act plays by Eugène Ionescu, The Lesson and The Chairs, in which she respectively played a teenager and a 90 year-old.

On returning to Britain, Plowright took over from Dorothy Tutin as Jean Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer. She later confessed to not liking the role of the disapproving daughter of washed-up music-hall comedian, Archie Rice. But it took her from Sloane Square to the West End and Broadway. Moreover, it brought her close to the man who would not only transform her career, but also her life.

Along Came Larry

Laurence Olivier had not liked Look Back in Anger when he first saw it. But he had taken a second look and decided to join the Royal Court revolution by starring in John Osborne's follow-up play, The Entertainer. In the meantime, Olivier had seen Plowright in the dress rehearsal for The Country Wife and had taken wife Vivien Leigh backstage to congratulate her on her performance.

When Plowright joined the company to play Jean Rice, Olivier's affection for an actress 22 years his junior continued to grow. His marriage to Leigh had started to falter after she had begun to experience mental health issues, but they were still an item when Olivier and Plowright took The Entertainer to Broadway in 1958.

'I enjoyed being in the play,' Plowright later confided, 'but I didn't much like the part.' She also had trouble with the title role in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, which had been filmed by Gabriel Pascal with Wendy Hiller in 1941. As a consequence, she had taken a short sabbatical from the Royal Court to join Robert Morley's French farce, Hook, Line and Sinker, which she had been persuaded to take on by a promise of rehearsals on a beach in the South of France.

On her return to Sloane Square, Plowright had one of the great triumphs of her career as Beatie Bryant, the uneducated Norfolk woman who learns to stand up for herself, in Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959). Olivier claimed to have been 'knocked right off my feet by her performance. For characterisation, for technique, observation, application and study - the result of which was work almost miraculous in its richness - she earned an unlooked-for blessing: unstinting acclaim, both critical and general.'

Having already sent her several letters of encouragement, Olivier agreed to co-star with Plowright in Ionesco's Rhinoceros at the Royal Court. The production wasn't a happy one, however, as Olivier thought Orson Welles's direction was chaotic and the friends fell out after Olivier ordered Welles to stay away from rehearsals. Things ran more smoothly when Plowright and Olivier renewed acquaintance in Tony Richardson's film version of The Entertainer (1960), which earned them both BAFTA nominations.

Richardson had nothing but praise for Plowright. 'Joan has a magical personality,' he enthused, 'and an emotional quality which melts your heart.' He would go on to direct Rita Tushingham in his adaptation of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey (1962). But it was Plowright who played Jo, the Salford teenager who gets pregnant by a Black sailor, on Broadway. Indeed, she so dazzled the critics that she won the Tony Award for Best Actress. The play was also significant, as Plowright and Billy Dee Williams shared the first mixed-race kiss in New York theatre history.

Plowright had met actor Roger Cage during her tour of South Africa and they had married in 1953. With Olivier now divorced from Vivien Leigh, he was keen to marry Plowright. So, she secured her own separation and married Olivier during her Broadway run. They celebrated the union by doubling up at the 1962 Chichester Festival in John Fletcher's The Chances and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, which transferred to the Old Vic the following year. Moreover, it was filmed for posterity and is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. When asked about the age difference, Plowright replied, 'Nothing is so sexy in a man as talent.'

Olivier had become convinced that Britain needed a National Theatre and Plowright became his staunchest supporter as he assembled a company at the Old Vic and made plans for a new venue next door to the Royal Festival Hall and the National Film Theatre on the South Bank. She also encouraged him to recruit critic Kenneth Tynan to be the troupe's literary manager so that they could perform the best new plays, as well as the crowd-pleasing classics. Yet, while she was also instrumental in persuading veterans like John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Michael Redgrave to attempt more contemporary works, Plowright refused to join the National Theatre for five years to avoid any accusations of favouritism.

Having won Best Actress at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for her lead in Shaw's Saint Joan (1963), Plowright had teamed with Olivier as Maggie in Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice and Hilda in Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder (both 1964). But she opted to spend part of this period raising the first two of hcr children, Julie-Kate and Richard (Tamsin would come along later). In 1967, she returned to work on contracts that allowed her to have quality time at home when not playing Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Masha in Three Sisters, Donna in Tartuffe, Rosaline in Love's Labour's Lost, and Portia in Jonathan Miller's take on The Merchant of Venice (1967-70).

In 1973 ( as Cinema Paradiso members can discover ), the latter was adapted for television, where Plowright had been appearing predominantly in one-off drama showcases, although she had played Lisa del Giocondo (Mona Lisa herself) in the ITV adventure series, Sword of Freedom (1958-61). It's a shame more of her small-screen work isn't available, as she excelled as Mrs Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank (1980), as Edith in 'A Dedicated Man' in the All For Love series (1982), and as La Poncia opposite Glenda Jackson in The House of Bernarda Alba (1991). But, such is the reach of Cinema Paradiso, we can bring you Plowright's displays as Lady Pitts in Daphne Laureola (1978), courtesy of Laurence Olivier Presents (2007), and as Meg Bowles in The Birthday Party (1987), via Pinter At the BBC (2019). Also available are her turns as Viola in Twelfth Night (1970), Mrs Taylor in Wagner (1983), and Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1988).

During this period, younger brother David Plowright was making his name as a senior executive at Granada Television and he coaxed his brother-in-law into playing Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited (1981) and taking the lead in King Lear (1983). Olivier could have his own moments of capriciousness, as his wife recalled: 'He has extremes of behaviour, which you understand. You just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons.' They continued to work together whenever they could, with Plowright reprising the role of Masha when Olivier directed a big-screen version of Three Sisters in 1970. That year saw him receive a life peerage, although Plowright never used the title Lady Olivier.

Although 'the guv'nor's wife' returned to the Old Vic to play Rosa in Franco Zeffirelli's vision of Eduardo de Filippo's Saturday, Sunday, Monday (1973) and Stella in J.B. Priestley's Eden End (1974), Plowright backed away from the company after Olivier stepped down as director and she was overlooked as Peter Hall was named his successor. Such was Olivier's disgust that when Hall cast Plowright as Martha in a revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he sent her a petition for divorce containing the words, 'No wife of mine will appear at Peter Hall's National Theatre.'

Tactfully, she withdrew with a throat infection. Otherwise, however, she was free to go her own way and followed a joust with Anthony Hopkins in A Woman Killed With Kindness (1971) by doubling up in The Doctor's Dilemma and The Taming of the Shrew at Chichester in 1972. She spent the following year at the Lyric Theatre in London doing Lindsay Anderson's revival of Chekhov's The Seagull, Ben Travers's swan song comedy, The Bed Before Yesterday, and Zeffirelli's take on De Filippo's Filumena (all 1978), which earned her Best Actress at the Society of West End Theatre Awards before they were renamed the Oliviers.

For the most part, Plowright was content to be a creature of the theatre. 'One can't pretend that most film dialogue is all that challenging,' she once complained. 'You do films if the roof needs mending.' It would be intriguing to know if it was the state of disrepair at the Malthouse in the Sussex village of Ashurst or the quality of Peter Shaffer's screenplay that prompted her to play Doris Strang, the mother of a teenager (Peter Firth) who blinds six horses with a sickle, in Sidney Lumet's stage transfer, Equus (1977). Whatever her motive, the picture brought her another BAFTA nomination, although she was in no hurry to return in front of the camera. She almost certainly played union leader Phyllis Grimshaw in Britannia Hospital as a favour to her old Royal Court mucker, Lindsay Anderson. But she relished the confrontational role (no wonder Lord Chandos once accused her of being 'a red') and she equally enjoyed the part of Norma Bates, whose car crash victim daughter (Suzanna Hamilton) is targeted by a predatory stranger (Sting) in Richard Loncraine's film version of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle (both 1982).

Back on the boards, Plowright endured a rare flop in Alan Bennett's prostitute saga, Enjoy (1980). But she bounced back as Nurse Edith in Cavell (1982). Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard (1983), Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World (1984), and the title role in Mrs Warren's Profession (1985). But Plowright's stage days were coming to an end, although she agreed to play Daisy McConnahay, the aristocrat who rallies to the call of fur trapper Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) in Hugh Hudson's Revolution (1985).

She also excelled as Liverpudlian seamstress Nellie in Jim O'Brien's adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge's The Dressmaker and as one of three women named Cissie Colpitts (along with Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson) in Peter Greenaway's deliciously dark comedy, Drowning By Numbers (both 1988). The following year, she was on equally fine form as the limping and unmarried Helen Stott in Jack Rosenthal's tele-version of C.P. Taylor's drama set in wartime Newcastle, And a Nightingale Sang (1989).

Early in 1989, Lawrence Kasdan offered Plowright her first Hollywood role. Despite being in poor health, Olivier insisted she played the part of Nadja, the Yugoslavian mother of pizzeria owner Rosalie Boca (Tracey Ullman), who has discovered that husband Joey (Kevin Kline) is a serial philanderer in I Love You to Death (1990). Ian McKellen and Maggie Smith agreed to babysit her husband, although the latter had her doubts: 'Ooh, I don't know, I'm very dubious. He'll go on at me about my vowels.' Olivier passed the time recording Shakespeare's Sonnets.

At the age of 82, however, Laurence Olivier died of kidney failure on 11 July 1989. A wife for 28 years, Plowright remained a widow for 36 more. But she only returned to the theatre twice in all that time. Firstly, in the autumn of 1990, she joined daughters, Julie-Kate and Tamsin, as well as son-in-law, Simon Dutton, in a production of J.B. Priestley's Time and the Conways, that was directed at the Old Vic by her son, Richard. From this point on, Joan Plowright acted exclusively for the camera. Sixteen years later, she would bid the stage arriverderci, as Signora Frola in Franco Zeffirelli's ABSOLUTELY! (perhaps) at Wyndham's Theatre.

Joan Alone

'Films seemed to have passed me by,' Plowright once said, looking back at the first four decades of her career. But she more than made amends over the next three decades, as she cropped up in a range of character roles that showed off her versatility and her lifelong reluctance to take herself seriously.

Having struck up a beguiling rapport with Armin Mueller-Stahl as Polish-Jewish immigrants, Sam and Eva Krichinsky, in Barry Levinson's Avalon (1990), Plowright drew on the domineering personality of a Suffragette great-aunt to create Mrs Mary Fisher, the cantankerous widow who joins Rose Arbuthnot (Miranda Richardson), Lottie Wilkins (Josie Lawrence), and Lady Caroline Dester (Polly Walker) in renting a castle in inter-war Italy in Mike Newell's glorious adaptation of Elizabeth von Arnim's Enchanted April (1991).

Plowright earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. But she won the Golden Globe in the same category on a night that saw her complete a rare double by taking the same prize in the TV section for her work as Olga Alliluyeva, the mother-in-law of Joseph Stalin (Robert Duvall) in Ivan Passer's HBO biopic, Stalin (1992). She had less luck with a pilot episode of Driving Miss Daisy (1992), which didn't go to series on the back Jessica Tandy winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in Bruce Beresford's Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

But a busy 1993 began with a pairing with Walter Matthau, as George and Martha Wilson being pestered by five year-old neighbour Dennis Mitchell (Mason Gamble), in Nick Castle's Dennis the Menace, which was adapted by John Hughes from the much-loved Hank Ketchum comic-strip. Plowright conspired in an in-joke in James Cameron's Last Action Hero, as she plays a teacher introducing a clip from Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948). But the year ended on a more gently humorous note, as Mrs Evelyn Monro (Plowright) questions whether son, Syl (David Threlfall), should be marrying aspiring nun, Margaret (Lena Headley), in order to please her dying mother, Monica (Julie Walters) in Waris Hussein's The Clothes in the Wardrobe (aka The Summer House), a Screen Two presentation that also starred Jeanne Moreau as Monica's best friend. It's a pity this fine film isn't currently available on disc. But what is even more regrettable is that Plowright and Moreau never got to fulfil their ambition to make senior citizen version of Thelma & Louise (1991).

Having pioneered a scheme for women dramatists at the National Theatre, Plowright was directed on screen by a woman for the first time when she played a grandmother in Stalinist Czechoslovakia in Hannah Kodicek's A Pin For the Butterfly. She next returned to the small screen to play Mrs Yeobright, alongside Ray Stevenson (Clem), Clive Owen (Damon Wildeve), and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Eustacia Vye) in Jack Gold's interpretation of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native (both 1994).

Staying on television, Plowright's Dorothy teamed with Sissy Spacek's Nurse Susan to care for a baby born HIV+ in John Gray's A Place For Annie. Staying Stateside, she joined the cast of Joan Tewkesbury's Disney drama, On Promised Land, which was set in the 1950s and showed how the Black workers at a lumber yard in the Deep South were exploited by Mrs Appletree and her son, Albert (John M. Jackson). But Plowright's best-remembered 1994 outing was John Irvin's Widows' Peak, which was set in the 1920s Irish village of Kilshannon, which is dominated by the twice-widowed Dawn Doyle-Counihan (Plowright), who leases a property to English war widow, Edwina Broome (Natasha Richardson), who becomes the target of patriotic boarding-house owner, Katherine O'Hare (Mia Farrow).

Showing no signs of letting up in her mid-60s, Plowright played suspected witch Harriet Hibbons, as Hester Prynne (Demi Moore) is accused of adultery in 1660s Massachusetts in Roland Joffé's take on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. She followed this typically deft piece of support playing in an otherwise overwrought melodrama by heading to Australia to essay Marge Morrisey, the neighbour of the Moynihan sisters, Meg (Caroline Goodall), Hilary (Caroline Gillmer), and Pippa (Tara Morice), whose lives are up-ended by the publication of a barely fictional novel in Richard Franklin's transfer of Hannie Rayson's play, Hotel Sorrento. And concluding another year in demand, Plowright reunited with Armin Mueller-Stahl to play Wendy Linzer, the wife of the owner of a Toronto pastry shop who tries to persuade assistant Sergio (John Leguizamo) to burn the place down for the insurance money in Joshua Brand's A Pyromaniac's Love Story (all 1995).

Grande Dame

It's hard to think of anyone better suited to the role of Nanny, helping Roger (Jeff Daniels) and Anita Dearly (Joely Richardson) keep Pongo and Perdita's puppies out of the clutches of vicious fashionista, Cruella de Vil (Glenn Close), in Stephen Herek's 101 Dalmatians (1996). Plowright clearly had a ball making the film and told reporters, 'Those puppies are so trusting; they are anybody's for an orange and leap up and lick you as if you're the love of their life.'

One suspects Anthony Hopkins was less effusive when he reunited with Plowright on James Ivory's Surviving Picasso, in which he played the Spanish artist and she took the relatively minor role of the grandmother of muse Françoise Gilot (Natascha McElhone). Curiously, this isn't currently on disc and neither is Nick Castle's Mr Wrong, which saw Ellen DeGeneres make her acting debut and Plowright essay sociopathic fiancée Bill Pullman's mother, Jessica Crawford. But Cinema Paradiso can bring you Plowright's performance as housekeeper Mrs Fairfax in Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (all 1996), which paired Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt as Jane and Mr Rochester.

She found herself married to Armin Mueller-Stahl again, as Morris and Ida Bober, in Daniel Petrie's take on Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1997). This barely seen film is one of several Plowright projects at this time that are difficult to find. She made her one and only sitcom appearance as singer Nathan Lane's mother, Marie Pinoni, in Encore! Encore! (1998-99) before taking on the role of CIA officer Jeanne Vertefeuille investigating Timothy Hutton's treacherous middle-ranking agent in John Mackenzie's fact-based teleplay, Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within. Staying on the small screen, she delighted as Rosemary, who defies her family's efforts to put her in a home by flitting off to Paris in Gavin Millar's This Could Be the Last Time (both 1998).

Returning to the mainstream, Plowright took to the floor as Bea Johnson, a pupil encouraging Rafael (Chayanne) to pursue the glamorous Ruby (Vanessa L. Williams) in Randa Haines's Dance With Me (1998). She then scored a dual triumph in Willard Carroll's Tom's Midnight Garden and Franco Zeffirelli's Tea With Mussolini (both 1999). Adapted from a bestseller by Philippa Pearce, the first cast her as Ortensia Bartholomew, the reclusive landlady of the property that has a secret garden that is discovered by Tom Long (Anthony Way) when he is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle (Greta Scacchi and James Wilby) while his brother recovers from measles. Reuniting with perhaps her favourite director, Plowright played Mary Wallace, the Shakespeare-reciting British expatriate in 1930s Florence, who becomes a surrogate mother to Luca Innocente (Charlie Lucas) and enlists the help of ambassador's widow Lady Hester Random (Maggie Smith), aspiring artist Arabella (Judi Dench), American socialite Elsa Morganthal Strauss-Armistan (Cher), and lesbian archaeologist Georgina Rockwell (Lily Tomlin) to raise him.

Still willing to try new things at the age of 71, Plowright voiced her first animated character, Beyline the Brachiosaurus, in Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton's Dinosaur (2000), which was Disney's 39th animated feature. She followed this with a couple of teleplay parts, Martha Sowerby, the new owner of Misselthwaite Manor, in Michael Tuchner's Back to the Secret Garden and Phoebe Harkness, Mischa Barton's grandmother, in JoBeth Williams's Frankie & Hazel (both 2000). While making these pictures, Plowright completed her autobiography, And That's Not All (2001), before she bowed out of television work as Aunt Angie in Michael M. Robin's Bailey's Mistake, a spooky tale set on a remote New England island, and as the narrator in Scrooge and Marley (both 2001), a Christmas special that starred Dean Jones as Charles Dickens's reforming miser.

Back on the big screen, Plowright joined Peter O'Toole to play Lord Charles and Lady Diana Foxley, the aristocrats who lease their mansion to Alicia Silverstone's rock band in Sidney J. Furie's Rock My World (aka Global Heresy, 2002). Despite being a huge fan of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, the music was more to her taste in Franco Zeffirelli's Callas Forever (2002), in which she played Sarah Keller, the trusted journalist confidante of opera singer Maria Callas (Fanny Ardant), as she is tempted by former manager Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) to make a film of Georges Bizet's Carmen.

Although Plowright radiated congeniality, she enjoyed playing the occasional reprobatory character, like Virginia Arness, the snooty client with unenlightened views on racial equality in Adam Shankman's Bringing Down the House, which centres on the efforts of tax lawyer Peter Sanderson (Steve Martin) to land a major contract while also helping escaped prisoner, Charlene Morton (Queen Latifah), prove she was framed for armed robbery. Also released in 2003, Paul Feig's I Am David offered a change of pace, as Plowright played Sophie, the Swiss artist who offers sanctuary to the 12 year-old boy (Ben Tibber) who has escaped a 1950s Bulgarian gulag in order to reunite with his mother in Denmark.

For the only time in her career, Plowright donned a wimple and habit to play the Mother Superior in Tom Reeve's George and the Dragon (2004), which follows Crusader knight George (James Purefoy) as he promises King Edgar (Simon Callow) to find his missing daughter, Princess Lunna (Piper Perabo). If this was little more than a bit part, Plowright was front and centre in Dan Ireland's adaptation of Elizabeth Taylor's much-loved novel, Mrs. Palfrey At the Claremont (2005), as Sarah Palfrey escapes her London retirement home and befriends struggling writer Ludovic Meyer (Rupert Friend), who agrees to pass himself off as her grandson in order to impress the other residents.

Having given perhaps the performance of her career, Plowright returned to the realm of animation to voice Victoria Plushbottom, the neighbour of Bloomsberry Museum guide, Ted (Will Ferrell), who gets her walls painted by a mischievous monkey in Matthew O'Callaghan's Curious George. While this reached a large audience, her other 2006 outing, Nicholas Kendall's Goose on the Loose, went under the radar, in spite of Plowright's spirited turn as Beatrice Fairfield, the mother of school principal Congreve Maddox (Chevy Chase), who is held hostage in return for a talking goose.

When it comes to magical creatures, Great-Aunt Lucinda Spiderwick appears to have the answers that twins Jared and Simon (both Freddie Highmore) and their older sister, Mallory (Sarah Bolger), are looking for in Mark Waters's The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008), an adaptation of the books of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black that sees Plowright play the daughter of the author of a a 1920s field guide to fairies. However, with her sight fading, she decided that Anthony Hickox's horror thriller, Knife Edge (2009), would be her final feature. She bowed out in typically fine form, however, as Marjorie Blake, the nanny who comes to work for ex-Wall Street trader, Emma (Natalie Press), when she moves into an English country house that has lain empty for decades and which holds a dark secret that soon has Emma doubting her sanity.

This might not have been the most glorious swan song. But, having lost her sight to macular degeneration, Plowright found herself with a surprise hit on her hands when she agreed to return from the Denville Hall retirement facility to the Sussex home she had once shared with Laurence Olivier for Roger Michell's delightful documentary, Nothing Like a Dame (2018). Along with companions Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, and Eileen Atkins, Plowright looked back over her career, poignantly revealing that she had turned down the part of Cleopatra at the National Theatre because she knew the critics would question whether she had the looks for the role. 'They all assume we think we're the bee's knees,' she mused. 'They don't realise that we're shaking inside.'

She also told the following anecdote, with impish relish. 'My agent in America said to me, when he knew I couldn't do very much because of the eyesight going: "Well, if you do want to come over again, we'll look around for a nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn't got her paws on."' Even Dame Judi managed as smile, as she tutted, 'How rude!'

Joan Plowright died at Denville Hall on 16 January 2025. She was 95. In a statement, her family said they were 'so proud of all Joan did and who she was as a loving and deeply inclusive human being'. Theatres in the West End dimmed their lights for two minutes as a mark of respect. It was a fitting tribute to an actress who had spent over three-quarters of a century giving her best.