Dame Joan Plowright: Acting star whose first love was theatre

Dame Joan found work a great solace following her husband’s death, appearing in a dozen films between 2000 and 2010.

They included 2003’s I Am David, about a boy who escapes a gulag in Bulgaria, and the comedy Bringing Down the House, starring Steve Martin, from the same year.

However, she clearly saw the silver screen as a poor cousin of the theatre.

“One can’t pretend that most film dialogue is all that challenging,” she said. “You do films if the roof needs mending.”

As if in agreement, the theatre in her native Scunthorpe renamed itself in her honour.

Her chief obstacle to more theatre work was her eyesight, she had macular degeneration, which made the stage increasingly difficult.

In 2014, blindness forced her retirement from all types of acting.

Four years later, she appeared alongside three old friends – Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench – in a BBC Arena film, Nothing Like a Dame.

The grandes dames of British theatre reminisced about their lives and careers, with searing honesty and humility.

Filmed in the garden of the home she had shared with Olivier, Plowright spoke candidly about how she had tried to avoid playing Cleopatra at the National Theatre, feeling that she would be mocked for her lack of beauty.

“They all assume we think we’re the bee’s knees,” she confessed. “They don’t realise that we’re shaking inside.”