JOAN OF ART
Inside the wonderful world of Joan Plowright including marriage to Laurence Olivier that defied all critics
Joan’s co-star Richard Burton asked her to run away with him, and her response spoke volumes
THE lights in London’s West End will be dimmed for two minutes on Tuesday in honour of award-winning actress Dame Joan Plowright, who has died at the age of 95.
She was a star of stage and screen for more than 70 years, but her toughest role was being the wife of the world’s most famous actor, Lord Laurence Olivier.
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Critics said their marriage would not last, but Joan learned to live with the Oscar-winner’s demons and voracious appetite for , and they stayed together for nearly 30 years.
In a rare interview in 2006, Joan admitted Larry, as he liked to be called, was “a man touched by genius and such men are also attended by demons”.
She added: “He would fight to overcome those demons and sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t.
“If a man is touched by genius, he is not an ordinary person. He doesn’t lead an ordinary life.
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“He has extremes of behaviour, which you understand and you just find a way not to be swept overboard by his demons.”
Joan fell in love with the man who would become her second husband in 1956, while playing his daughter in John Osborne’s West End play The Entertainer.
She had married actor Roger Gage just three years earlier and Laurence, who was 22 years her senior, was unhappily wed to Vivien Leigh, star of Gone With The Wind.
Larry had confided in a friend that his wife’s sex drive was too much for him, saying: “With Vivien, it’s every day, two or three times. She’s wearing me out.”
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And when Vivien started an affair with the actor Peter Finch, it was almost with his approval.
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Settle down
A friend said: “Olivier was almost happy to palm Vivien off to Finch.”
In Joan, Olivier saw a different life — one where he could settle down and have more children.
Vivien eventually agreed to a divorce and Laurence went on to marry Joan at a US register office in Connecticut in 1961.
The wedding officiant there was probably the only person in the world not to recognise the actor.
After asking his name, she said: “Profession?”
And when Laurence, a household name all over the world, replied “actor”, she asked: “Are you? How very nice.”
Joan’s mum thought her new son-in-law was little more than a philanderer. There had also been rumours that Larry had enjoyed gay affairs.
My mother had a reputation for being an outstanding local actress and she channelled her enthusiasm back to us.
Joan Plowright
Soon after marrying Joan, he began an on-off affair with another young actress, Sarah Miles, his co-star in 1962 film Term Of Trial and, ten years later, the romantic film drama Lady Caroline Lamb.
Despite his affairs, they had three children — son Richard, who became a theatre director and daughters Tamsin and Julie Kate, who both became actresses.
They had the family life that Olivier craved at their manor house near Brighton.
And when the children complained that they didn’t like being picked up in a Rolls-Royce, Larry bought a London taxi for the school run.
After the birth of each of her children, Joan took two years off work, but she always returned to the stage because acting for her was “as necessary as breathing”.
In 1961, Joan won a Tony Award for her role as Jo in Shelagh Delaney’s
A Taste Of Honey on Broadway, alongside Dame Angela Lansbury. She made her film debut in 1977 as the mother of a troubled boy in Equus.
Joan’s co-star Richard Burton later asked her to run away with him, but she insisted she was with Laurence “for the long haul”.
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A star was born
Joan was destined for the limelight.
Born in Brigg, Lincs, in 1929, her mother Daisy was an amateur actress and her father William was the editor of the Scunthorpe and Frodingham newspaper.
In a 2018 documentary, Nothing Like A Dame with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, Joan said: “My mother had a reputation for being an outstanding local actress and she channelled her enthusiasm back to us.”
When Joan told her mum she was going into acting, her mother said: “You’re no oil painting, but you’ve got the spark and thank God you have my legs and not your father’s.”
Joan got herself an agent who thought her name “sounded like a trade. Like ploughs and agriculture”.
Joan said: “He suggested something like Desiree Day.
“I said there was no way I could live up to that. I didn’t change my name — I changed my agent.”
After drama school, she trod the boards in the West End, playing cabin boy Pip in Orson Welles’s production of Moby Dick in 1955.
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Her first marriage fell apart the following year when she met Larry.
Joan said: “[Laurence] would talk about his life — that he was at a crossroads, that life had become horrendous for him and he had to make a break. He wanted a family life, a life of substance, not living out of a trunk and glitzy parties.”
Their marriage endured for 28 years, with Joan becoming Larry’s carer during myriad illnesses, culminating in his death from prostate cancer in 1989, aged 82.
Every Christmas, Joan and her children would visit Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, where Larry’s ashes are interred.
In widowhood, her career flourished.
She starred in Love You To Death with River Phoenix in 1990 and hit movie 101 Dalmatians in 1996.
She won Golden Globes in 1993 for comedy Enchanted April and the TV biopic Stalin.
In 2014, ten years after being made a Dame, Joan announced she was retiring due to going blind.
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Confirming her death, Joan’s family said yesterday: “She cherished her last ten years in Sussex with constant visits from friends and family.
“She survived her many challenges with Plowright grit and courageous determination to make the best of them, and that she certainly did.”
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