Joan Plowright - # 339

Joan Plowright, Venerable Legend of the British Stage, Dies at 95

She won a Tony, was nominated for an Oscar and was married to Laurence Olivier for nearly three decades. 

She was number 339 on the list.

Joan Plowright, the distinguished actress of the post-war British stage whose considerable skill as a performer was at times eclipsed by her fame as the third and last wife of Laurence Olivier, has died. She was 95.

Plowright died on Jan. 16 surrounded by family in her native U.K. A statement from the family released on Friday to the BBC said: “It is with great sadness that the family of Dame Joan Plowright, the Lady Olivier, inform you that she passed away peacefully on January 16 2025 surrounded by her family at Denville Hall aged 95.”

It added: “She enjoyed a long and illustrious career across theatre, film and TV over seven decades until blindness made her retire. She cherished her last 10 years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family, filled with much laughter and fond memories. The family are deeply grateful to Jean Wilson and all those involved in her personal care over many years.”

A Tony Award winner in 1961 for Tony Richardson and George Devine’s A Taste of Honey and an Oscar nominee for Mike Newell’s Enchanted April (1991), Plowright belonged to a celebrated group of British actresses (Judi Dench and Maggie Smith among them) who came into their own in the 1960s and ’70s.

These women did not have the romantic appeal, their insouciant charm or the heartbreaking looks of some of their predecessors. But they had something else — raw talent — that helped them become household names, first in England and later the world.

Almost all grew up in working- or middle-class homes; almost all made their mark on the stage long before film and television; and almost all were beneficiaries of a tidal wave of change in the British theater that had begun in the late 1950s when a handful of “Angry Young Men” took aim at the glamorous, upper-class, frivolous and sometimes facetious characters of playwrights such as Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan and put blue-collar characters center stage instead.

It was through the foremost of these Angry Young Men, John Osborne, that Plowright became involved with Olivier in 1957 when she was 28 and he was 50. Plowright had only recently arrived at London’s avant-garde and left-wing Royal Court Theatre when she was cast as Sir Laurence’s daughter in Osborne’s The Entertainer, the story of an aging music hall performer struggling to maintain some sort of dignity in his waning days.

The actress, who later admitted that she never cared for the role (it was not “fully three-dimensional,” she said), was as shocked as her colleagues when Olivier condescended to leave the West End and appear at the Court, the equivalent of off-Broadway. He was theater royalty; more than that, he was an international superstar who hobnobbed with the rich and mighty, and here he was, slumming it for £50 a week.

What Plowright didn’t realize was that he had reached a crisis point, both personally and professionally. “I was going mad,” he explained, “desperately searching for something suddenly fresh and thrillingly exciting.”

He found it not only in Osborne’s work but also in a relationship with the younger actress. Their affair, which began on Nov. 28, 1957 — when Olivier recorded in his diary that he had spent the night “with Joanie” — was complicated by the fact that he was married to Vivien Leigh, one of the most famous women on the planet, a two-time Oscar winner and an extraordinary beauty, while Plowright herself was still married to her first husband, actor Roger Gage.

To Leigh’s horror, after trying to break free of his affair and spending time away from both women while he shot Spartacus, Olivier told his wife he was leaving her for Plowright, whom he married in 1961, soon after his divorce became official. Leigh made the affair public well before then, when Plowright found herself besieged by reporters after Leigh, in one of the manic episodes that had blighted her marriage (part of her long and tormented history with bipolar disorder), announced that Olivier was leaving her for another woman, just as he had left his first wife, actress Jill Esmond, for Leigh.

Plowright’s love affair with Olivier was both her triumph and her tragedy: It propelled her to fame but for years prevented her getting her due as a performer. Despite her considerable success and critical plaudits, that only truly changed when she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004, 15 years after Olivier’s death at age 82 on July 11, 1989.

Born in the country market town of Briggs, Lincolnshire, on Oct. 28, 1929, in the less affluent north of England, Joan Ann Plowright was the daughter of a local newspaper editor and his homemaker wife, a gifted dabbler in amateur dramatics who encouraged her daughter to act. “I learned sort of fairly early on that I felt rather confident on stage,” she told Andrew MacKay in a 2010 British Library interview. “I felt more confident being somebody else on stage than I felt being myself in real life.”

Her early memories were shaped by the bigger town of Scunthorpe, an agricultural center that was in the midst of becoming an industrial hub. Her family moved there when she was just a toddler, and its local theater is now named after her.

“Within the next 10 years,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir, And That’s Not All, “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.”

Plowright did that the moment she left Scunthorpe Grammar School, winning a place at London’s Old Vic Theatre School, where she studied in a bombed-out building that had been struck during the Blitz and had yet to be repaired. (Her brother David did the same, rising to become chairman of Granada Television.)

At the Vic, Plowright trained under the famed trio of directors Devine, Michel Saint-Denis and Glen Byam Shaw. “The uniqueness of the triumvirate who ran the Old Vic Theatre School lay in the fact that they were not primarily teachers but practicing professionals,” she recalled. “All three were directing plays at the Old Vic Theatre and thus, as well as handing out criticism to their students, they were on the receiving end of it themselves from critics in the national press.”

After her graduation, Plowright found an agent and began to get work, not least a small role in Orson Welles’ adaptation of Moby Dick at the Duke of York’s Theatre. “Rehearsals were long, arduous and chaotic,” remembered “Snooks,” as Welles nicknamed her in summer 1955.

“Some days 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.”

It was, nonetheless, “the most brilliantly imaginative, exciting and unpredictable theatrical experience of my life.”

(A less successful reunion with Welles followed in 1960, when the maestro directed Plowright and Olivier in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. The hyper-organized Olivier and hyper-chaotic Welles — good friends until that point — clashed, and eventually Olivier told Welles to stay away from rehearsals while he got the production into shape. “Orson was bitterly hurt,” noted Plowright.)

Other roles followed, both with the Bristol Old Vic (not to be confused with the London version) and with a group that toured apartheid-era South Africa, where the actress was appalled to see a white farmer shove a black man into the gutter.

In 1956, Devine invited her to join the newly formed English Stage Company, to be based at the Royal Court, and there, Plowright said, “I felt for the first time totally at home in a theater. I was in touch with people who cared, as I cared, about creating a theater that was to do with the 20th century. I found my own voice as an actress, and an exhilarating sense of purpose, which had been sadly lacking elsewhere.”

Joining forces with dazzling young impresarios such as Richardson and John Dexter, Plowright discovered a remarkable generation of writers — not just Osborne but also Arthur Miller, Arnold Wesker, Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Many of the people she worked with “were the product of a free and better educational system and state scholarships to Oxbridge [Oxford and Cambridge Universities],” she noted, adding that they shared a ferociously irreverent attitude toward the prevalent ruling classes. “Often of semi-proletarian origin and from the provinces, they were surprisingly sophisticated, articulate and self-confident.”

While Plowright did not star in the seminal play of that era, Osborne’s 1956 drama Look Back in Anger, the badge it gave to a theatrical generation stuck to her just as much as it did her male colleagues. “It was shortsighted of people to label us ‘kitchen sink’ or ‘angry young men’ [and women],” she observed, “but we were all irretrievably identified with that image after Look Back in Anger, whether we had appeared in it or not.”

She got to know Olivier through the Court. They were separated by years, tastes, politics and ideology. “In our eyes, he represented everything my generation was trying to change in the theater,” she acknowledged. But their feelings shifted when Plowright took over the part Dorothy Tutin had created in The Entertainer after the play transferred from the Royal Court to the Palace Theatre and then went on tour.

Working with Olivier, she found him to be “bristling with energy, and his smile was full of mischief; it was as though he had been let off a leash … he had banished all traces of that titled gentleman of the Establishment. He was simply an actor among actors, but one of such extraordinary accomplishment, and with such electricity crackling around him, that I was both exhilarated and exhausted by the end of the day.”

Escaping the hullabaloo that accompanied the Oliviers’ break-up, Plowright took Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey to Broadway, where it opened the night before Olivier’s Beckett and won her a Tony Award in 1961.

Once married, Olivier left London and abandoned his country house, Notley Abbey, moving with Plowright to Brighton, where they remained for most of their time together. With her, he created a very different image from the one he had helped spawn as half of the golden couple “Larry and Viv.” Although Plowright technically became Baroness Olivier when her husband was elevated to the House of Lords in 1970, she never used the title.

She and Olivier subsequently worked together on several notable productions, including acclaimed versions of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters (both by Plowright’s favorite author, Chekhov) at the Chichester Festival Theatre, where Olivier served as artistic director, and then at the National Theatre, when Olivier ran that institution. So closely was Plowright associated with his work and regime that when he stepped down, there was serious talk she might replace him, though that job eventually went to Peter Hall.

Her other stage roles include a widely admired Saint Joan in the George Bernard Shaw play; Portia in The Merchant of Venice, opposite Olivier’s Shylock; Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew (with Anthony Hopkins as Petruchio); and leads in two plays by Eduardo De Filippo, Filumena and Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

In addition to the 1960 movie version of The Entertainer, her film résumé included Sidney Lumet’s Equus (1977), Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), Dennis the Menace (1993), Last Action Hero (1993), 101 Dalmatians (1996), Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini (1999) and Bringing Down the House (2003). She retired in 2014.

Survivors include her three children with Olivier, Richard, Tamsin and Julie-Kate.

A natural comedienne, Plowright learned to mask her inner feelings with laughter, as The Guardian noted following the publication of her autobiography. “Laughter is her element, I am surprised to discover,” its reporter observed. “She has a laugh that has been there, roared at that: smoky, charged, contagious. There is almost no question that doesn’t earn a wail or a hoot. She has learnt the art of ‘laughing it off,’ a technique for getting through life, sailing onward and, at times, she rolls her eyes upward as she laughs, as if appealing to the corners of the room for help.”

That laughter was fully evident in 2018’s Nothing Like a Dame (released in the U.S. as Tea With the Dames), Plowright’s last major onscreen appearance. Elderly and blind as a result of macular degeneration, she sat around a table in her country home with old friends and rivals Dench and Smith, along with Eileen Atkins, as the four actresses reminisced about their lives in front of director Roger Michell’s loving camera.

Plowright had survived Olivier by almost three decades after years supporting him through long and excruciatingly painful illnesses — and years in which they lived largely separate lives. Rather than wax lyrical about her notoriously difficult spouse, she huffed and smiled and admitted that “it was a bit of a nightmare sometimes.”

She was as down-to-earth as Leigh was quixotic, as rooted in reality as the first Lady Olivier was at times removed from it. A pragmatist who saw theater as a practical matter that depended on technique as well as art, she nonetheless recognized the complexity of any great actor — which applied not just to her husband but to herself as well.

“We are all full of several personalities,” she said in the British Library interview. “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.”

 

Theatre

Theatre roles

Year     Title            Role            Venue

1948    If Four Walls Told            Hope (stage debut)            Croydon Repertory Theatre, England

1954    The Merry Gentlemen            Allison            Bristol Old Vic, England

The Duenna            Donna Clara            Westminster Theatre, London

1955    Moby Dick     Pip            Duke of York's Theatre, London

1956    The Crucible            Mary Warren Royal Court Theatre, London

Dom Juan            Baptista          Royal Court Theatre, London

The Death of Satan            Receptionist     Royal Court Theatre, London

Cards of Identity Miss Tray     Royal Court Theatre, London

The Good Woman of Setzuan            Mrs. Shin      Royal Court Theatre, London

The Country Wife            Margery Pinchwife            Royal Court Theatre

Adelphi Theatre, London

1957    The Making of Moo            Elizabeth Compton            Royal Court Theatre, London

1958    The Entertainer            Jean Rice     Palace Theatre, London

Major Barbara            Major Barbara            Royal Court Theatre, London

Hook, Line and Sinker  Arlette            Piccadilly Theatre, London

The Lesson            The Student Phoenix Theatre, Off-Broadway

The Chairs            Old Woman

The Entertainer            Jean Rice     Royale Theatre, Broadway

1959    Roots            Beatie Bryant            Belgrade Theatre, Coventry

Royal Court Theatre, London

Duke of York's Theatre

1960            Rhinoceros      Daisy            Royal Court Theatre, London

A Taste of Honey            Josephine         Booth Theatre, Broadway

1962    The Chances            Another Constatia            Chichester Festival Theatre, England

1962–1963            Uncle Vanya  Sonya            Chichester Festival Theatre

Old Vic Theatre, London

1963    Saint Joan     Saint Joan     Old Vic Theatre, London

1964            Hobson's Choice            Maggie Hobson            Old Vic Theatre, London

The Master Builder Hilda Wangel Old Vic Theatre, London

1967–68            Much Ado about Nothing            Beatrice          Old Vic Theatre, London

Three Sisters            Masha            Old Vic Theatre, London

Tartuffe            Dorine            Old Vic Theatre, London

1968    The Advertisement            Teresa            Old Vic Theatre, London

Royal Theatre, London

Love's Labour's Lost            Rosaline          Old Vic Theatre, London

1969    Back to Methuselah, Part II  Voice of Lilith Old Vic Theatre, London

1970    The Merchant of Venice  Portia            New Theatre, London

1971    A Woman Killed with Kindness            Mistress Anne Frankford            New Theatre, London

The Rules of the Game            Silla            New Theatre, London

1972    The Doctor's Dilemma            Jennifer Dubedat            Chichester Festival Theatre, England

The Taming of the Shrew            Katharina            Chichester Festival Theatre, England

1973            Rosmersholm            Rebecca West            Greenwich Theatre, London

1973

1974–75            Saturday, Sunday, Monday            Rosa            Old Vic Theatre, London

Queen's Theatre, London

1974    Eden's End      Stella Kirby   Old Vic Theatre, London

National Theatre, London

1975    The Seagull Irena Arkadina            Lyric Theatre Company, London

The Bed before Yesterday            Alma            Lyric Theatre Company, London

1978            Filumena            Filumena Marturano            Lyric Theatre, London

1980    Enjoy            Mam            Vaudeville Theatre, London,

The Best House in Naples            Filumena Marturano            St. James Theatre, Broadway

1981    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?            Martha            Royal National Theatre, London

1982    Cavell            Performer      Royal National Theatre, London

1983    The Cherry Orchard            Madame Ranevskaya            Haymarket Theatre, London

1984    The Way of the World  Lady Wishfort            Haymarket Theatre, London

1985    Mrs. Warren's Profession            Mrs. Warren            Lyttelton Theatre, London

1986–87            The House of Bernarda Alba            La Poncia  Lyric Theatre, London

Globe Theatre, London

1990    Time and the Conways            Mrs. Conway            Old Vic Theatre, London

Actress

Natalie Press in Knife Edge (2009)

Knife Edge

4.5

Marjorie Blake

2009

 

Sarah Bolger and Freddie Highmore in The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008)

The Spiderwick Chronicles

6.5

Aunt Lucinda Spiderwick

2008

 

Goose on the Loose (2006)

Goose on the Loose

4.4

Beatrice Fairfield

2006

 

Frank Welker in Curious George (2006)

Curious George

6.5

Ms. Plushbottom (voice)

2006

 

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005)

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

7.6

Mrs Palfrey

2005

 

George and the Dragon (2004)

George and the Dragon

5.6

Mother Superior

2004

 

I Am David (2003)

I Am David

7.1

Sophie

2003

 

Steve Martin and Queen Latifah in Bringing Down the House (2003)

Bringing Down the House

5.6

Virginia Arness

2003

 

Fanny Ardant in Callas Forever (2002)

Callas Forever

6.4

Sarah Keller

2002

 

Alicia Silverstone in Rock My World (2002)

Rock My World

6.0

Lady Foxley

2002

 

Dean Jones and Reg Grant in Scrooge and Marley (2001)

Scrooge and Marley

5.2

TV Movie

Narrator

2001

 

Linda Hamilton in Bailey's Mistake (2001)

Bailey's Mistake

4.9

TV Movie

Aunt Angie

2001

 

Frankie & Hazel (2000)

Frankie & Hazel

5.8

TV Movie

Phoebe Harkness

2000

 

Back to the Secret Garden (2000)

Back to the Secret Garden

5.7

TV Movie

Martha Sowerby

2000

 

Dinosaur (2000)

Dinosaur

5.6

Video Game

Baylene (voice)

2000

 

D.B. Sweeney in Dinosaur (2000)

Dinosaur

6.4

Baylene (voice)

2000

 

Nathan Lane in Encore! Encore! (1998)

Encore! Encore!

7.2

TV Series

Marie Pinoni

1998–1999

12 episodes

 

Florence Hoath and Anthony Way in Tom's Midnight Garden (1999)

Tom's Midnight Garden

6.5

Mrs. Bartholomew

1999

 

Cher, Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, and Joan Plowright in Tea with Mussolini (1999)

Tea with Mussolini

6.9

Mary

1999

 

Timothy Hutton in Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within (1998)

Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within

6.3

TV Movie

Jeanne Vertefeuille

1998

 

This Could Be the Last Time (1998)

This Could Be the Last Time

6.0

TV Movie

Rosemary

1998

 

Vanessa Williams and Chayanne in Dance with Me (1998)

Dance with Me

5.9

Bea Johnson

1998

 

The Assistant (1997)

The Assistant

5.8

Mrs. Ida Bober

1997

 

Glenn Close in 101 Dalmatians (1996)

101 Dalmatians

5.8

Nanny

1996

 

Anthony Hopkins in Surviving Picasso (1996)

Surviving Picasso

6.3

Françoise's Grandmother

1996

 

Mr. Wrong (1996)

Mr. Wrong

3.8

Mrs. Crawford

1996

 

Jane Eyre (1996)

Jane Eyre

6.8

Mrs. Fairfax

1996

 

Demi Moore and Gary Oldman in The Scarlet Letter (1995)

The Scarlet Letter

5.3

Harriet Hibbons

1995

 

Erika Eleniak, William Baldwin, John Leguizamo, and Sadie Frost in A Pyromaniac's Love Story (1995)

A Pyromaniac's Love Story

5.3

Mrs. Linzer

1995

 

Hotel Sorrento (1995)

Hotel Sorrento

6.5

Marge Morrisey

1995

 

Catherine Zeta-Jones, Clive Owen, and Ray Stevenson in The Return of the Native (1994)

The Return of the Native

6.0

TV Movie

Mrs. Yeobright

1994

 

A Pin for the Butterfly (1994)

A Pin for the Butterfly

6.3

Grandma

1994

 

A Place for Annie (1994)

A Place for Annie

7.2

TV Movie

Dorothy

1994

 

Norman D. Golden II and Joan Plowright in On Promised Land (1994)

On Promised Land

7.9

TV Movie

Mrs. Appletree

1994

 

Mia Farrow, Natasha Richardson, and Joan Plowright in Widows' Peak (1994)

Widows' Peak

6.6

Mrs. Doyle-Counihan

1994

 

Walter Matthau and Mason Gamble in Dennis the Menace (1993)

Dennis the Menace

5.7

Martha Wilson

1993

 

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Austin O'Brien in Last Action Hero (1993)

Last Action Hero

6.5

Teacher

1993

 

Screen Two (1984)

Screen Two

6.3

TV Series

Mrs. Monro

1993

1 episode

 

Stalin (1992)

Stalin

7.0

TV Movie

Olga

1992

 

Driving Miss Daisy (1992)

Driving Miss Daisy

7.0

TV Movie

Daisy Werthan

1992

 

Glenda Jackson in The House of Bernarda Alba (1991)

The House of Bernarda Alba

7.7

TV Movie

Poncia

1991

 

Polly Walker in Enchanted April (1991)

Enchanted April

7.3

Mrs Fisher

1991

 

Sophie

TV Movie

Sophie

1991

 

Sophie

Short

1990

 

Michael Krauss in Avalon (1990)

Avalon

7.2

Eva Krichinsky

1990

 

Kevin Kline, River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, William Hurt, Tracey Ullman, and Joan Plowright in I Love You to Death (1990)

I Love You to Death

6.4

Nadja

1990

 

And a Nightingale Sang (1989)

And a Nightingale Sang

7.6

TV Movie

Mam

1989

 

The Dressmaker (1988)

The Dressmaker

6.2

Nellie

1988

 

Theatre Night (1985)

Theatre Night

6.9

TV Series

Lady Bracknell

Meg

1987–1988

2 episodes

 

Joely Richardson in Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Drowning by Numbers

7.1

Cissie Colpitts 1

1988

 

Revolution (1985)

Revolution

5.3

Mrs. McConnahay

1985

 

Richard Burton, Vanessa Redgrave, László Gálffi, Marthe Keller, and Ekkehard Schall in Wagner (1983)

Wagner

7.4

TV Mini Series

Mrs. Taylor

1983

1 episode

 

Brimstone & Treacle (1982)

Brimstone & Treacle

6.4

Norma Bates

1982

 

Jean Simmons and Ian Carmichael in All for Love (1982)

All for Love

7.2

TV Series

Edith

1982

1 episode

 

Summer Festivals

TV Series

Nurse Edith Cavell in Cavell

1982

1 episode

 

Britannia Hospital (1982)

Britannia Hospital

6.2

Phyllis Grimshaw: The Unions

1982

 

The Diary of Anne Frank (1980)

The Diary of Anne Frank

6.7

TV Movie

Mrs. Frank

1980

 

Daphne Laureola (1978)

Daphne Laureola

6.8

TV Movie

Lady Pitts

1978

 

The Collection (1976)

Saturday Sunday Monday

6.8

TV Movie

Rosa

1978

 

Richard Burton and Peter Firth in Equus (1977)

Equus

7.1

Dora Strang

1977

 

Laurence Olivier in The Merchant of Venice (1973)

The Merchant of Venice

7.2

TV Movie

Portia

1973

 

Three Sisters (1970)

Three Sisters

6.2

Masha

1970

 

Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Paul Scofield, and Anna Calder-Marshall in ITV Saturday Night Theatre (1969)

ITV Saturday Night Theatre

5.8

TV Series

Viola - Sebastian

1970

1 episode

 

Richard Beckinsale, Freddie Fletcher, Arthur Lowe, Jack Rosenthal, and Paula Wilcox in ITV Playhouse (1967)

ITV Playhouse

7.0

TV Series

Lisa

1970

1 episode

 

Uncle Vanya (1967)

Uncle Vanya

7.5

TV Movie

Sofia Alexandrowna

1967

 

NET Playhouse (1964)

NET Playhouse

7.3

TV Series

Sonya

1967

1 episode

 

Uncle Vanya (1963)

Uncle Vanya

7.6

Sonya

1963

 

Laurence Olivier and Shirley Anne Field in The Entertainer (1960)

The Entertainer

7.1

Jean Rice

1960

 

World Theatre (1959)

World Theatre

6.6

TV Mini Series

Lady Teazle

1959

1 episode

 

ITV Play of the Week (1955)

ITV Play of the Week

6.7

TV Series

Winnie Verloc

1959

1 episode

 

ITV Television Playhouse (1955)

ITV Television Playhouse

7.8

TV Series

Jane Maxwell

1959

1 episode

 

Theatre Night (1957)

Theatre Night

8.3

TV Series

Arlette Le Boeuf

1959

1 episode

 

Sword of Freedom (1957)

Sword of Freedom

7.6

TV Series

Lisa Giocondo

1957

1 episode

 

Time Without Pity (1957)

Time Without Pity

6.8

Agnes Cole

1957

 

BBC Sunday-Night Theatre (1950)

BBC Sunday-Night Theatre

7.0

TV Series

Phoebe

Adriana

1954–1956

3 episodes

 

Orson Welles and Joan Plowright in Moby Dick Rehearsed (1955)

Moby Dick Rehearsed

7.6

TV Movie

A Young Actress

Pip

1955

 

Sara Crewe

TV Series

Winnie

1951

4 episodes

 

Thanks

Roger Allam, Richard Armitage, Anna Calder-Marshall, Toby Jones, Dearbhla Molloy, Peter Wight, Aimee Lou Wood, and Rosalind Eleazar in Uncle Vanya (2020)

Uncle Vanya

7.5

special thanks (as Dame Joan Plowright)

2020

 

Soundtrack

Laurence Olivier and Shirley Anne Field in The Entertainer (1960)

The Entertainer

7.1

performer: "When There Isn't a Girl About", "The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery" (uncredited)

1960

 

Self

Arena (1975)

Arena

7.6

TV Series

Self

1976–2018

3 episodes

 

Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, and Joan Plowright in Tea With the Dames (2018)

Tea With the Dames

7.4

Self (as Dame Joan Plowright)

2018

 

Peace One Day (2004)

Peace One Day

7.6

Self

2004

 

Living Famously (2002)

Living Famously

8.4

TV Series

Self

2003

1 episode

 

The Laurence Olivier Awards 2002

TV Special

Self - Presenter

2002

 

Omnibus (1967)

Omnibus

7.1

TV Series

Self

2001

1 episode

 

Christmas Glory 2000 (2000)

Christmas Glory 2000

7.5

TV Special

Reader

2000

 

Globos de Ouro 1999

6.6

TV Special

Self

2000

 

The Laurence Olivier Awards 1999

TV Special

Self - Presenter

1999

 

Rosie O'Donnell in The Rosie O'Donnell Show (1996)

The Rosie O'Donnell Show

4.1

TV Series

Self - Guest

1999

1 episode

 

David Letterman, Regis Philbin, Barbara Gaines, Biff Henderson, Alan Kalter, and Paul Shaffer in Late Show with David Letterman (1993)

Late Show with David Letterman

7.0

TV Series

Self - Guest

1993

1 episode

 

The 65th Annual Academy Awards (1993)

The 65th Annual Academy Awards

6.4

TV Special

Self - Nominee

1993

 

Michael Aspel in This Is Your Life (1955)

This Is Your Life

6.5

TV Series

Filmed tribute

1993

1 episode

 

David Letterman in Late Night with David Letterman (1982)

Late Night with David Letterman

7.5

TV Series

Self - Guest

1993

1 episode

 

The 50th Annual Golden Globe Awards (1993)

The 50th Annual Golden Globe Awards

6.8

TV Special

Self - Winner

1993

 

Good Day New York (1988)

Good Day New York

4.5

TV Series

Self - Guest

1993

1 episode

 

Terry Wogan in Wogan (1982)

Wogan

6.0

TV Series

Self

1990

2 episodes

 

Great Performances (1971)

Great Performances

7.9

TV Series

Self

1983

1 episode

 

The Dick Cavett Show (1975)

The Dick Cavett Show

7.9

TV Series

Self - Guest

1980

2 episodes

 

The Evening Standard Awards

TV Special

Self

1974

 

Festival of Arts

TV Series

Self

1962

 

Archive Footage

Weekend Breakfast (2012)

Weekend Breakfast

5.0

TV Series

Self - Actress (archive footage, uncredited)

2024

1 episode

 

Discovering Film (2014)

Discovering Film

7.6

TV Series

Self (archive footage)

2015

1 episode

 

Fifty Years on Stage (2013)

Fifty Years on Stage

8.6

TV Movie

Saint Joan (archive footage)

2013

 

Nastassja Kinski, Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, and Dexter Fletcher in Revolution: Revisiting Revolution - A Conversation with Al Pacino and Hugh Hudson (2009)

Revolution: Revisiting Revolution - A Conversation with Al Pacino and Hugh Hudson

8.6

Video

Mrs. McConnahay (archive footage)

2009

 

Larry and Vivien: The Oliviers in Love

7.4

TV Movie

(archive footage)

2001

 

John Mills in Sir John Mills' Moving Memories (2000)

Sir John Mills' Moving Memories

7.5

Video

Self (archive footage)

2000

 

TV Hell (1992)

TV Hell

7.3

TV Series

(archive footage)

1992

1 episode

 

V.I.P.-Schaukel (1971)

V.I.P.-Schaukel

7.9

TV Series

Jean Rice (archive footage)

1977

1 episode