Joan Plowright, who has died aged 95, was not only a remarkable actor but a dynamic force for change in British theatre. In her work at the Royal Court in the 1950s she symbolised a new working-class energy, although in reality she was the daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, and through her marriage to Laurence Olivier, she helped to shape the newly founded National Theatre company in the 1960s. There’s a choice moment in the film Nothing Like a Dame when she says she has the burden of bearing two titles, dame and baroness, to which Maggie Smith sardonically replies, “Joan, darling, you’ll just have to wrestle with it.” But wrestle with it she did and she never lost the earthiness that was part of her inheritance.
Her attitude to theatre also stemmed from her training at the Old Vic theatre school, which was set up in the bomb-damaged Waterloo Road building in London in the freezing winter of 1947: at a time when many drama academies resembled superior finishing schools, this one, under the tuition of Michel Saint-Denis, instilled a rigorous Stanislavskian approach to acting. For Plowright, this bore fruit when she became a founding member of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court in 1956. She instantly made her mark in Wycherley’s The Country Wife and Ionesco’s The Chairs and The Lesson, alongside George Devine, but it was her performance as Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker’s Roots in 1959 that marked her out as a star. She not only understood perfectly how the daughter of Norfolk farmworkers achieved self-realisation: when she leapt on to a chair it was, as noted at the time, “the image of the working class breaking in to a new life”.
