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Joan Plowright at 90: the star who spoke truth to British theatre

On the actor’s birthday, our critic picks three key performances that illuminate her gift for earthy honesty

Joan Plowright, who celebrates her 90th birthday today, is the senior figure in a remarkable generation of actors including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins, all celebrated in the film Nothing Like a Dame. Her marriage to Laurence Olivier inevitably made her part of showbiz aristocracy but Plowright brought to British theatre a quality of earthiness and emotional directness shared by near-contemporaries such as Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole and Billie Whitelaw. As the daughter of a Lincolnshire newspaper editor, she could hardly be called working-class yet she was part of a movement that helped British theatre shed its aura of evasive gentility.

You could, for the sake of convenience, divide Plowright’s working life into three phases: her Royal Court period, her National Theatre years and her post-National freelance career.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/31MC7Qo
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