Joan Ann Olivier, Baroness Olivier, DBE, commonly known as Dame Joan Plowright, is a retired English actress whose career has spanned over seven decades. She has won two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award and has been nominated for an Academy Award, an Emmy and two BAFTA Awards. She is also one of only four actresses to have won two Golden Globes in the same year.
Plowright made her stage debut at Croydon in 1948 and her London debut in 1954. In 1956 she joined the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and was cast as Margery Pinchwife in The Country Wife. She appeared with George Devine in the Eugène Ionesco play, The Chairs, Shaw's Major Barbara and Saint Joan. as Helen in the Broadway production of A Taste of Honey In 1957, she co-starred with Sir Laurence Olivier in the original London production of John Osborne's The Entertainer, taking over the role of Jean Rice from Dorothy Tutin when the play transferred from the Royal Court to the Palace Theatre. She continued to appear on stage and in films such as The Entertainer. In 1961, she received a Tony Award for her role in A Taste of Honey on Broadway. Through her marriage to Laurence Olivier, she became closely associated with his work at the National Theatre from 1963 onwards. In the 1990s she began to appear more regularly in films, including Enchanted April, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination, Dennis the Menace, a cameo in Last Action Hero and Tea With Mussolini. She was also the Nanny in 101 Dalmatians. Among her television roles, she won another Golden Globe Award and earned an Emmy Award nomination for the HBO film Stalin in 1992 as the Soviet dictator's mother-in-law. In 1994, she was awarded the Women in FilmCrystal Award. In 2003, Plowright performed in the stage production Absolutely! in London. She was appointed honorary president of the English Stage Company in March 2009, succeeding John Mortimer, who died in January 2009. She was previously vice-president of the company. Plowright was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1970 New Year Honours and was promoted to Dame Commander in the 2004 New Year Honours. Plowright's eyesight declined steadily during the late 2000s and early 2010s due to macular degeneration. In 2014, she officially announced her retirement from acting because she had become completely blind.
Personal life
Plowright was first married to Roger Gage, an actor, in September 1953. She divorced him and, in 1961, married Laurence Olivier after the ending of his 20-year marriage with the actressVivien Leigh. The couple had three children, one son and two daughters. Both daughters are actresses. The couple remained married until Lord Olivier's death in 1989. Her brother, David Plowright, was an executive at Granada Television.
Upon her marriage to Sir Laurence Olivier in 1961, her formal title became Lady Olivier; however, she never used it in her professional career. Her husband was made a life peer in 1970, and from that point she became Baroness Olivier. As with the title of Lady Olivier, she did not use the title of Baroness Olivier professionally. As of 2004, she is known professionally as Dame Joan Plowright upon being made Dame Commander. Her full and official title, as both the widow of a peer and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, is The Right Honourable The Baroness Olivier DBE.
