Dame Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, was an actress of enormous and wide-ranging talent across a 60-year stage and screen career. Plowright was “perhaps the greatest Anglophone actor of the 20th century”, in Variety’s words. She was certainly a leading pioneer in post-war British theatre’s modernisation – particularly in terms of her theatrical style, as well as her geographic and class origins.
Raised in a middle-class family in Scunthorpe, northern England, Plowright’s theatrical credentials were already dubious according to snobbish metropolitan attitudes of the time, and were weakened further by her unfashionably plump face. “You’re no oil painting,” her mother commented, “but you’ve got the spark. Just thank God you’ve got my legs, and not your father’s.”
An early agent disparaged the name “Plowright” as sounding like “trade… ploughs and agriculture”, and suggested an alternative like Desiree Day. Plowright kept her name and changed her agent.
