One of Joan Plowright’s greatest screen performances came towards the very end of her career: a gloriously subtle, lovable appearance on Roger Michell’s documentary Nothing Likea Dame from 2018, with four great dames of the British acting profession – Plowright, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith – assembling like Marvel superheroes at the country home that Plowright shared with her late husband Laurence Olivier to drink tea and swap uproarious anecdotes and sharp observations about the acting profession and the sexism they and their younger colleagues continue to face.
The then 89-year-old Plowright, despite her failing health and eyesight, exchanges affectionate badinage with the others: “My agent in America said to me, when he knew I couldn’t do very much because of the eyesight going: ‘Well, if you do want to come over again, we’ll look around for a nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn’t got her paws on.’” (Dench replies tartly: “How rude!”)
The association with Olivier was important: Plowright made her movie breakthrough in The Entertainer in 1960, the kitchen-sink movie adaptation of John Osborne’s hit play in which she had also appeared on stage with Olivier. The role revived Olivier’s career: fading old vaudeville turn Archie Rice whose tatty act symbolises Britain’s own postwar self-doubt. Plowright played neither Rice’s wife nor the young woman with whom he’s carrying on an illicit liaison – but rather his concerned daughter: a performance of intelligence, sensitivity and humility. After the film came out, Plowright married Olivier once his divorce from Vivien Leigh had come through and both Olivier and Plowright flourished within her caring supportive calmness and strength, which she also brought to the screen.
Plowright’s looks and style arguably came into their own in her later years as a distinguished character actor, chiefly in supporting roles in which she lent distinction to a range of films. She was the robustly assertive mother-in-law Eva in Barry Levinson’s Avalon in 1990 and a commanding presence in Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre in 1996 as Mr Rochester’s housekeeper Mrs Fairfax. For good or ill, she played in many “old lady” films such as Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini in 1999 as British expat Mary Wallace, one of the waspishly opinionated women who meet regularly in Florence during the fascist 1930s. She was the querulous Mrs Fisher in Mike Newell’s Enchanted April in 1991 (again with an Italian setting) and had another formidable matriarch role in John Irvin’s comedy-drama Widows’ Peak in 1994. These movies and Plowright’s roles were perhaps all bested by Nothing Like a Dame, where Plowright showed the flash of humour not generally available to her in many scripts.
Plowright arguably found a bit more to get her teeth into with the 1988 film The Dressmaker, based on the novel by Beryl Bainbridge – an author whose comic vision is tailor-made for Plowright – in which Plowright played the fiercely upright and respectable 1940s dressmaker in Liverpool, appalled by her sister and niece being enamoured of GIs.
But perhaps the role she was born to play was the lead in Dan Ireland’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 2005 – a forthright American production of Elizabeth Taylor’s much-loved poignant 1971 novel, in which Plowright is the redoubtable widow who finds herself stranded at a genteel, melancholy “retirement hotel”, and who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young man. Plowright is superbly cast, and the role brings out her knack for showing the vulnerability behind the tough front. The thought of her character at a retirement hotel has bittersweet echo with her own final years at Denville Hall, the retirement facility for the acting profession.
Perhaps her career flourished as much or more on stage – but the movies showed us a performer of authority, intelligence and gentleness.
