Acknowleged as one of the finest stage actresses of her generation, Joan Plowright found feature success later in life as a character player along the lines of Alice Brady, Anne Revere and Dame Mae Whitty. When she married Laurence Oliver in 1961, Plowright agreed to put his career needs first and she spent much of the 1960s raising their three children and making occasional stage appearances. By the 70s, she and the aging Olivier worked together in several plays, TV specials and the rare film. After his death in 1989, Plowright came into her own as a character actress, generally cast as kindly matriarchs or starchy aristocrats.
The daughter of a newspaper editor, Plowright was encouraged to engage in artistic pursuits by her mother. At age 15, she won an amateur theater prize that included a week's run as a maid in a production with the Harry Hanson Players. Hanson discouraged the teenager and she returned home, later winning a scholarship to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Plowright first garnered attention as a member of the Royal Court Theatre in such productions as "The Crucible" and "The Constant Wife". (It was in the title role of the latter that she first caught Olivier's attention.) In 1957, she landed the role of Archie Rice's daughter opposite Olivier in John Osborne's acclaimed "The Entertainer" and went on to repeat the role on Broadway (1958) and on film (1960). For her performance as an unwed mother in "A Taste of Honey", the actress received a 1961 Tony Award. Plowright spent the better part of the next two decades dividing her time between her family and the London stage, where she triumphed as Shaw's "St. Joan" (1963), as Portia in "The Merchant of Venice" (1970, to Olivier's Shylock) and in the title role of "Filumena" (1980). By the end of the 80s, as her film work increased, she made fewer stage appearances.
Plowright landed her first significant film role in Joseph Losey's taut thriller "Time Without Pity" (1957). Sidney Lumet cast her as the mother of an emotionally troubled son in "Equus" (1977) and she was the religious parent of a comatose girl in "Brimstone and Treacle" (1982), scripted by Dennis Potter. The plummy-voiced actress began to come into her own as one of a trio of murderous women in the same family (who also shared the name of Cissie Colpitts) in Peter Greenaway's bizarre "Drowning By Numbers" (1987; released in the USA in 1991). In 1990, Plowright delivered two very confident and different family matriarchs: in Lawrence Kasdan's black comedy "I Love You to Death", she was the tabloid-loving Yugoslavian mother of a woman (Tracey Ullman) plotting to kill her philandering husband (Kevin Kline), while in Barry Levinson's underrated "Avalon", she avoided stereotype as a meddling Jewish mama. After earning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a snooty widow with literary connections in Mike Newell's "Enchanted April" (1992), Plowright found herself in demand as a character player. She was the missus to Walter Matthau's Mr. Wilson in the big screen version of "Dennis the Menace" (1993) and played a variation of her "Enchanted April" character in "Widow's Peak" (1994). More recently, Plowright graced Franco Zeffirelli's remake of "Jane Eyre", as the housekeeper, was the grandmother of Francoise Gilot in the Merchant-Ivory "Surviving Picasso" and played a stalwart nanny in Disney's live-action version of "101 Dalmatians" (all 1996). After a featured role in the romantic drama "Dance With Me" (1998), Plowright returned to television as the mother of a world-famous opera singer (Nathan Lane) and owner of a family operated vineyard in "Encore! Encore!" (1998). As the eccentric mother, Plowright shined. But despite her, often described as over-the-top hilarious contributions, "Encore! Encore!" was cancelled the following year. Later, in 1999, Plowright received yet another memorable role, this time as a high society Englishwoman in "Tea with Mussolini." Her role as Mary Wallace was a reminder of why Plowright continued to be a sought-after artist. Another comfirmation came in 2003, when the actress was paired with Steve Martin and Oscar nominee Queen Latifah in the comedy "Bringing Down The House" (2003), a feature about a lawyer (Martin) who discovers that the woman he's been corresponding with (Latifah) is not who she said she was. Plowright played Martin's billionaire client adding both class and humor to the role.