Joan Plowright
Joan Ann Plowright, Baroness Olivier, DBE[1] (born 28 October 1929), professionally known as Dame Joan Plowright, is an English retired actress whose career spanned over six 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 was the second of only four actresses (as of 2023) to have won two Golden Globes in the same year. She won the Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a New Play in 1978 for Filumena.
The Lady Olivier
Actress
1948–2018
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Roger Gage(m. 1953; div. 1960)
3
David Plowright (brother) Emily Eaton-Plowright (great-niece)
Early life[edit]
Plowright was born on 28 October 1929 in Brigg, Lincolnshire, the daughter of Daisy Margaret (née Burton) and William Ernest Plowright, who was a journalist and newspaper editor.[2][3] She attended Scunthorpe Grammar School[4] and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.[5]
Personal life[edit]
Plowright was first married to Roger Gage, an actor, in September 1953. She later divorced him and, in 1961, married Laurence Olivier shortly after the end of his twenty-year marriage to the actress Vivien Leigh. Plowright and Olivier had three children, son Richard (born 1961), daughter Tamsin Agnes Margaret (born 1963) and daughter Julie-Kate (born 1966).[12] Both daughters became actresses.[13] The couple remained married until Olivier's death in 1989.
Her younger brother, David Plowright (1930–2006) was an executive at Granada Television.
Legacy[edit]
The Plowright Theatre in Scunthorpe is named in Plowright's honour.
Styles[edit]
Upon her marriage she became Lady Olivier. In 1970, her husband Sir Laurence Olivier was made a life peer and Plowright became Lady Olivier, of Brighton in the County of Sussex. As the wife and widow of a life peer, she is entitled to be styled The Right Honourable The Lady Olivier, and since 2004, “The Lady Olivier DBE”.
In 2004 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE), and is professionally known as Dame Joan Plowright.