Joan Plowright came to the cinema late, from a long stage career, and never pretended it was the main event. On screen that becomes a virtue: a widow or a grandmother who says the cutting thing quietly and does not wait for a laugh.
Fi1m perspective
Mrs Fisher in Enchanted April (1991) is a literary widow who has gone to Italy to be left alone and finds herself with company. Joan Plowright plays her as a woman who decided long ago that most people are slightly beneath her and sees no reason to raise her voice about it. The lines, on the page, are ordinary observations about other people's shortcomings. She says them exactly, as if reading out a verdict, and the exactness is what makes them funny. Mike Newell's film is gentle to a fault, and she is the reason it is not merely pleasant.
She was a stage actor first and for most of her working life. The Royal Court in the 1950s, Beatie Bryant in Arnold Wesker's Roots (1959), Jean Rice opposite Laurence Olivier in the film of The Entertainer (1960), then the National Theatre through the 1970s as Sonya, Masha and Saint Joan. Films were a sideline, and she said so: "You do films if the roof needs mending." The screen work only thickens from the late 1980s, with Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers (1988), then Newell, then a long run of character parts: Nanny in 101 Dalmatians (1996), Mary Wallace for Franco Zeffirelli in Tea with Mussolini (1999), and a rare lead in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005). Her last screen appearance was in Nothing Like a Dame (2018).
What travels from the stage is the certainty. In Dennis the Menace (1993) she has little to work with, a comic-strip neighbour's wife, and she gives Martha Wilson enough warmth that Walter Matthau's grumbling becomes bearable; the two of them have the timing of a couple who have been arguing for decades and know which fights are worth having. It is a small thing done properly in a thin film. We laughed harder at Mrs Fisher than the writing deserved, and it was never the line that did it but the way she placed it, the sense of a judgement already made before the scene began. That is the thing she does that others do not. She arrives having decided.
It did not always serve her. Cast again and again as the grande dame, she could let the manner stand in for the woman, and in some of the later American parts and in Tea with Mussolini the shrewdness goes soft and sentimental. The film career was supporting work almost throughout, which is a poor use of someone who had played Chekhov and Shaw at the National, and she does not seem to have minded in the least.
Start with Enchanted April, where the sharpness has somewhere to go and the film knows what it has. Dennis the Menace is for anyone with a child and an afternoon to fill. The rest is a serious actor keeping the roof on, and doing it, each time, with more care than the job asked for.
Biography
Joan Plowright was an English actress whose career spanned stage and screen from the late 1940s until the 2010s. She trained at the Laban Art of Movement Studio in Manchester and the Old Vic Theatre School in London, making her professional stage debut in 1948 and appearing in London productions from 1954. She was a founder member of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre.
Plowright won a Tony Award for her performance in A Taste of Honey (1960) and received two Golden Globe Awards for Enchanted April (1991) and the television film Stalin (1992), as well as an Academy Award nomination for the former. She appeared in films including Drowning by Numbers (1988), The Entertainer (1960), 101 Dalmatians (1996) and The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008). She was married to actor Laurence Olivier from 1961 until his death in 1989 and was appointed DBE in 2004. She retired from acting in 2014 due to macular degeneration and died in 2025.
